Notes to a New Choral Director

Notes to a former student, about to become music director of a college a capella group:

In my experience, leading a choral group is equal parts of three things: seeing possibilities, getting excited about making them happen, and figuring out how to communicate those things. In other words:

• Vision (informed by musical skill)
• Being (appreciation and genuine affection for the music, singers, and practice)
• Rehearsal Technique (musical, and in terms of communication)

Vision
It's worth thinking specifically about, writing down, and talking through with someone the direction you want to take with the group and any changes of procedure you might initiate. Even if never articulated overtly during rehearsal, the more clarity of vision you've earned within yourself, the more confident and effective you'll be. If you embody a stong vision, that gives the singers something to resopnd to, and then you can take it from there in building your relationship.

Being

• Share your passion for both the music and for the craft of engaging musical material; take pleasure not only in the objective quality of the sound, but in the progress and discoveries made by individuals and the whole group, day to day.

• Facilitate to best effect the skills and abilities already present amongst the group, including those that are beyond your own. Don't get stuck in "teaching" mode when it's not needed.

Rehearsal Technique

• Give headlines of purpose/intent
• Communicate with the intention of being gotten -- really check to see if they're with you
• Be large with your gestures, voice and energy -- it's like being on stage
• Respond specifically to what you hear in the moment

These may all see obvious, but they're often left out.

Have fun!

Tears and Traditions

My father is 82 years old and he cries easily. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. The other day I got an email from my brother Gene urging me to buy a recording of Anne-Sophia Mutter playing the Carmen Fantasy. “Dad cried when he heard it,” he said. “But I guess that’s not saying much.”

My Dad’s stride piano playing has always been full of emotion, and I remember him crying a few times when I was a kid. But now his sensitivity – or his willingness to show it – has increased. I find this refreshing. It’s as if he’s been liberated from the social mask of appropriateness. So now a beautiful musical piece, a play, or even a heart-felt toast might set him off. Both of my parents, in fact, have revealed new depths of presence and compassion as they’ve aged gracefully into their 80s.

With the unique gifts of old age on my mind, I saw three performances by elderly artists this season in New York: the legendary, 87-year-old Indian Sitarist, Ravi Shankar; the Broadway star Barbara Cook, celebrating her 80^th birthday; and the classical pianist, Alfred Brendel, 77.

When a student invited me to see Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall last October, I wasn’t expecting much. I figured his fame had more to do with his Beatles association than with his musical mastery. When I arrived the crowd was a buzzing mix of aging baby boomers, Indians (some in traditional garb), and hip kids. But as I took in the aura of excitement in the hall at a few minutes before 8:00, I wondered how much of it had to do with the music itself.

Carnegie concerts often make me nervous. Maybe because of my own experiences playing piano in formal settings when I was a kid, I tend to project performance anxiety on the performers and worry about them. But when Anoushka Shankar, Ravi’s daughter, came on stage in bare feet to open the concert, smiled at us, and sat on the floor to begin playing, I immediately relaxed and thought to myself with a grin: if I ever perform at Carnegie Hall, I want to do it in bare feet!

The playing by Anoushka and the whole ensemble – tablas, tamboura, and Ney flute – was similarly unadorned. It was tonally and rhythmically complex, but without pretense, and I was struck by the degree of interactive emotion among the performers.

After intermission, Ravi Shankar’s diminutive 87-year-old figure padded lightly downstage center, escorted by Anoushka. The other musicians immediately rose and approached him to touch his feet respectfully, and the audience, also rising, seemed swept up in the emotion. We celebrated with our attention and applause the man who had played such an important role in bringing Indian music and culture to the West. While Shankar’s presence evoked the emotion, we were also honoring the lineage of Indian music and the flow of history. 

 Opening with the typically slow, meditative Alap of the Indian classical style, his first note evoked a universe of its own, filled with such beauty, tenderness, and humility I was embarrassed I’d ever questioned the depth of his artistry. How could a single note carry so much? This was music beyond any technique or analysis – it was a direct expression of the man’s being – or of something beyond him. Although his physical vulnerability added poignancy to the whole affair, his playing became vigorous, exciting, and joyful. I understood he was a master.

Next month at Avery Fischer Hall, a friend took me to hear Barbara Cook, backed up by the New York Philharmonic, at her 80^th birthday concert. The audience, mostly white and over 50, seemed less diverse and more rarified than the one at the Shankar concert. They knew the Broadway repertoire - which roughly spanned their lifetimes – backwards and forwards, and they gasped with audible excitement each time Cook announced a well-known Sondheim song.

What most struck me about Barbara Cook, besides her impressively lithe movement and the evident strength and breath power in her voice, was her emotionally direct delivery. She seemed to embrace the idea songs are actually about something, not merely a vehicle for an emotional pose. There was humor in her presentation, but no irony, gratuitous vocal displays, or over-played nostalgia. The power of expression was in the music and lyrics themselves -- how each song captured something essential about human experience – and in the quality of her delivery.

Did her class-act have anything to do with her age, I wondered, or was it simply characteristic of her generation’s mode of expression – or that of any great artist? I wished my high school students had been there.

In February I was back at Carnegie Hall, this time with a different feeling. Lucky enough to get last minute, on-stage seats, I sat about twenty five feet from the Steinway Grand, close enough to hear Alfred Brendel’s off-key humming and to see his hands tremble before they hit the keys. Looking out at the hall from the stage and eager to hear the iconic Brendel give his farewell Carnegie performance, I remembered the excitement of my own performances as a kid and young adult.

Carnegie Hall is like a cathedral, a giant space housing the values and human aspirations of another era, when humans had longer attention spans and strong longings to place themselves within a lineage -- an art form, or a religion – greater than themselves or their generation. I realized how deeply connected I still feel to the Western classical tradition, and I was thrilled, that night, to feel it’s still alive.

 In an era when music is probably more often regarded as a form of rebellion, or at least as a way of distinguishing one generation from the next, it was refreshing to me to hear Brendel’s unabashed rejoicing in his connection to the past. His renderings of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert were exciting and revealing. During pianissimo passages he looked upwards and appeared transported to an inner world.

He offered Bach – the slow movement of the Italian Concerto – for his first encore. What better way to say goodbye than to go back to the beginning of the modern classical tradition? Not only the sounds emanating from the piano evoked emotion that night, but the context – my personal piano-playing memories intermingling with the collective memory of a musical and performing tradition hundreds of years old.

When I was in India, recently, I immersed myself in the ancient roots and current practice of a different, though equally inspiring, musical culture. For ten days I sang microtones in unusual modes and struggled to pronounce lyrics in Hindi and Sanskrit while coming to terms with India’s poverty and squalor.

Waiting for my plane to take off at Varanasi airport, I reviewed the riches of my adventure – sound files I’d collected on my digital recorder: my teacher, Silvia, leading a vocal meditation – Shanti Om; Ritwick, another teacher, correcting my intonation in the Phrygian (Bhairavi) mode; flipping the tracks backwards, a group of men I’d recorded early on, singing in parallel fifths one morning on the banks of the Ganges; and then, two teenage girls singing a haunting melody with a harmonium.

Immersed in the “rasa” – taste – of India, I kept flipping and was startled to come upon a track I’d forgotten about. It was the sweet, jazzy sound of a melody turning around the circle of fifths as a piano bass line gently rocked the beat. It was my father playing “Georgia on My Mind,” just after Christmas, a few days before I’d left for India.

I listened with a smile, tasting the sweet rasa of American music and thinking with gratitude back to my deepest musical roots, to a lineage closer to my heart but presently halfway around the globe, and I knew I was ready to go home.

The Art of Improvisation

When was the last time you heard improvisations based on Fats Waller, Frederic Chopin, and Antonio Carlos Jobin tunes, all in a single concert program? Last week Dariusz Terefenko, offering a piano recital on "The Art of Improvisation" at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, resurrected the art of classical improvisation and bridged the worlds of classical and jazz piano in his exciting lunchtime performance, part of the Graduate Center's "Music in Midtown" series.

These days, musical improvisation is usually considered the domain of jazz musicians, thanks in part to its indispensable role in jazz's ubiquitous form of presentation: an ensemble plays a tune, each musician then improvises on the chord progression, and finally the musicians come together to play the melody once more. Soloists generally follow the same form.

But whatever this design may lack in formal imagination, it nevertheless carries music that is, almost by definition, alive with vulnerability. Improvising isn't easy, and the "freedom" associated with it demands a flexible command of harmonic language and the ability to play in many keys -- something jazz musicians generally invest years of practice to achieve, and improvised ensemble playing further challenges players to respond skillfully and spontaneously to the other musicians. 

Today's classical musicians, by contrast, generally produce note-for-note recreations of past, elaborately-developed scores. Their performances (hopefully) reveal both a deep understanding of complex musical form and a mastery of demanding technique -- central elements of the classical tradition. In addition, playing within the parameters of a set, finely crafted score invites full exploration of a composition's particular expressive potential -- something a composer may have spent years creating and to which most classical artists are devoted. But ask classical musicians to play something by ear or improvise on the spot, and you might find them staring blankly into space.

Improvisation wasn't always divorced from classical music. Many great composers whose finished pieces we so often hear today were also great improvisers when they were alive. Mozart's improvisatory prowess was legendary (depicted in the movie "Amadeus") as were Liszt's and Beethoven's, to name a few.

With the exception of artists like Gabriela Montero, a performing classical pianist who also specializes in improvisation, and Keith Jarrett, who, in addition to his famous jazz performances has recorded Bach, Shostakovich, and Handel, contemporary musicians generally seem to have chosen one path or another, as manifested in the jazz and classical traditions: either developing fluid, spontaneous mastery of harmonic/melodic musical material or the ability to craft interpretations of challenging, set compositions.

Classical education has long neglected the improvisatory art, but many traditional conservatories such as Julliard, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Eastman School of Music, have instituted jazz programs in recent years, and there are signs of integration.

Mr. Terefenko, unusually, is a professor in both the classical theory and jazz programs at Eastman, and his delightful program broke down the barriers between the two traditions. His playing's lyrical, cascading echoes of Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans found voice not only through Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin" but in fantasies on Chopin's famous Prelude in E-minor, Op. 28, No. 4, and Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1. The Prelude was rich with jazzy chord substitutions while the Mazurka took on fiery dance-like qualities related to, but quite different from, the original. It was refreshing to hear the harmonic and rhythmic elements of these familiar pieces used as points of imaginative departure rather than as fixed entities.

Hearing him speak after the concert about the importance, for all improvisation, of mastering counterpoint, was a reminder improvisation doesn't belong to jazz or to any particular musical style, but is rather a way of imaginatively and spontaneously engaging musical materials.

Sound Science?

I’ve dreamed of going to India since 1984. On the run from college, over-achievement, the East Coast, and certainty, I moved to Berkeley, California, and there I was first frightened by the ecstatic street chants of the Hari Krishnas, afraid I’d become one of them; freaked by a friend who visited Guru Mayi (of Siddha Yoga) at her Oakland Ashram and returned to say he’d “handed in all his marbles and she gave them back in a different color;” and inspired by the Krishnamurti movie, “Challenge of Change,” which confirmed my quest for meaningful living. Since that time, India’s spiritual traditions have been a source of sustenance in my life.

With a sense of destiny, I finally arrived in India last December on a ten-day trip to study Indian classical music in the ancient city of Varanasi.

One day our international group of 20 singers visited Dr. Vagish Shastri, a master of Nada Yoga (the science of sound). Deep within his Ashram’s inner sanctuary and far from the city’s noise and filth, we entered a room with short rows of matching blue cushions, each adorned with a brochure listing the accomplishments of this “Great Pandit of Oriental Learnings.” We took our seats and gazed respectfully at him, cross-legged and elegantly poised on padded white fabric and surrounded by iconic Hindu paintings and the gentle clutter of an actively-consulted book collection.

As the muffled sound of tuning tablas drifted in from the next room and the sweet smell of incense caressed our inner beings, Dr. Shastri chuckled, gesticulated and pronounced in his high pitched voice the esoteric details of Yoga’s hierarchy of the human senses. We took notes and thumbed our audio recorders while he, punctuating his points, twisted around and drew diagrams of the senses’ relationship to the natural elements on a small blackboard behind him. He peppered us with arcane questions: what’s an unbeaten sound? Which is more subtle, water or fire? Where does fire go to seek union?

It was exciting to view the world from such a rarified perspective, and Dr. Shastri gradually unveiled a comprehensive system whereby one of the five senses is assigned to each of the five elements in a causal relationship and organized from left to right in a hierarchy of increasingly subtlety and power: earth/smell; water/taste; fire/vision; air/touch; ether/sound.

To give one example of how subtlety manifests along the scale, Earth, the most gross element, can be experienced through all five senses whereas pure water lacks smell; fire lacks both smell and taste; and air lacks smell, taste, or color, etc. Increasing subtlety implies additional creative power, he asserted, and a further analysis yielded Dr. Shastri’s ultimate conclusion: without sound, there is no creation.

Hold on. Nada Yoga’s resemblance to modern physics’ String Theory -- through its claim subtle vibration is the ultimate building block -- is compelling, but I was having trouble getting past the implicit assumption that understanding the natural elements is a serious avenue of spiritual or scientific inquiry. The others in my group appeared to receive the master’s wisdom with reverential humility -- ooing, ahing and laughing nervously. But humility isn’t my strength, and I wasn’t ready to go along without fleshing out my skepticism. Was this a journey to Enlightenment or just to an old-fashioned, vessel-filling style of teaching? Dutiful confluence in a classroom isn’t usually a good idea, in my opinion, and part of me was annoyed at being lectured to.

I raised my hand. I may also have been frowning. I wanted to challenge what seemed like holes in the logic -- why was fire more powerful than water, for example; couldn’t it go the other way? – and invite him to convince me the whole theory wasn’t just an exotic metaphor. I wanted to take it more seriously, and if I could get it, maybe the world could, too.

But when he didn’t call on me after a few moments, I reconsidered. It wasn’t I thought I knew better than he; he just wasn’t inviting dialogue, and part of me had disengaged. This wasn’t the student-centered classroom I was used to.

Then he asked with a giggle: what is beauty? Is beauty contained in sound itself, or within us?

I sat taller. This question reminded me of the ancient Western philosophical debate between St. Augustine, who viewed musical experience as the listener’s responsibility, and Boethius, who believed music itself was the active determinant, capable of either improving or debasing our character. Musical philosophers are still debating the question, and I wondered what Dr. Shastri would have to say.

“Beauty is in the ocean and in our hearts,” he continued, with a gentle smile. He gestured grandly to the room’s shelves and pointed out the many sizes shapes and colors of the books. Noting the patterns created by their organization, he announced: beauty is rhythm!

Before I had much time to ponder this, he directed us into the next room, towards the tabla drums I’d heard earlier, where his two granddaughters and their musical tutor waited. Looking relaxed and like a kindly paternal elder, Dr. Shastri took his place in a commanding armchair as we resettled ourselves on the floor. In another moment we were joined by a little boy who scampered in, quickly pursued by an effervescently smiling young American disciple with a sandalwood bindi on her forehead, who seemed to be looking after him. This room felt more intimate, like a family room.

The girls, beautifully dressed in pastel saris, began droning the harmonium and singing Bhajans – devotional songs – from the Bhagavad Gita. What seemed at first like simple melodies then took unexpected twists and turns, finding voice through a raga (scale) that used both major and minor thirds and a raised fourth degree – very unusual to Western ears. Each time the major third returned it was an unexpected, contrasting delight, endowed with emotional tenderness and longing.

Led by the tabla’s pitched percussion, the music’s rhythmic cycles were satisfyingly repetitive, like the blues, and often with a similarly climactic release of energy at the cycle’s turn-around. But like most Indian music I’ve heard -- organized into 10, 12, or 16-beat rhythmic loops with uneven subdivisions – this was harder to follow, even if the aficionados in the room all smiled and gestured simultaneously at the moment of rhythmic release. It reminded me of trying to post when riding a horse, where understanding and moving with its rhythm enables one to better enjoy the ride, rather than simply sitting and passively hoping it takes you somewhere.

The girls finished singing as dusk darkened the room and an amplified, evening call-to-prayer drifted in from a nearby Mosque. With a few deep breaths we savored the music’s taste – rasa – and then bowed our thanks to Dr. Shastri and his granddaughters, purchased his textbooks, put on shoes, and reentered India’s relentless stream of sensory stimulation.

Navigating around piles of garbage and patches of dubious mud in Varanasi’s back alleys, we passed on-coming cows, walls
plastered with dung, open-air silk shops with artisans working foot-pedaled looms, boys playing cricket, and crouching beggars warming their hands on small fires as we found our way back to another centerpiece of our continuing experience with India and life in Varanasi – the Ganga River.

                                                   

Voice in Varanasi

With the ceaseless cacophony of shouting peddlers, playing children, bathing pilgrims, drumming street musicians and cavorting goats, cows, monkeys and elephants emanating from below, I'm standing on a marble balcony among bronze statues and potted marigolds, overlooking the sea-like Ganga river and waiting for a voice lesson.

It's a world apart from the shiny linoleum floor and drip-drip-drip of the Mr. Coffee machine in my childhood classical piano teacher's waiting room, but some aspects of the experience are similar: the music's complex beauty and long tradition, the teacher's mastery, and my own strong desire to do it well. I'm nervous, excited, and happy to be a music student.

This week I'm among 24 singers from around the world -- all students of Silvia Nakkach's Vox Mundi School of Voice -- who have come to Varanasi, India, to learn Dhrupad, an ancient form of Indian classical singing. Dhrupad's roots go back a millennium or more and it's been practiced in its current form since about 1400, when it became popular in Indian royal courts.

A strictly oral tradition, unlike Western classical music, Dhrupad has been passed along through lineages such as the Dagar family, now in its 19th generation of musicians. Our teacher for the week is Professor Ritwick Sanyal, who learned from the Dagars and is a master in his own right

I quickly learn oral traditions are much more than the "rote learning" sometimes decried by music educators who prioritize literacy. Dhrupad's complexity of structure and extraordinary subtlety of pitch are engraved in the ear, mind and body, through repeated call and response with the teacher, in ways that would be impossible to notate; hand's are constantly in motion as they express the character of each tone and it's relationship to the other tones; memory is challenged and exercised in ways we've become unaccustomed to in our age; and, the frequent use of microtones and glissandi are about as far from Western practice as you can get.

Ritwick quickly finds the edge of my ability and admonishes me to sing "from the heart," "from the chest" or, when simulating the scooping sound of a tabla drum, "with an added breath force." He demonstrates several gradations of microtones as he corrects my intonation. As the phrases become increasingly complex I realize if my attention strays for even a moment, I'm lost.

Direct, and somewhat formal in bearing, but kind, Ritwick delights in the soft, melting beauty of the music and he's compassionate towards my struggles. He asks me to sing down to a low C# - considerably beyond the average male range -- and I think I've done respectfully well since I can at least make a sound. But he smiles sweetly and says: "you're closed." He keeps challenging me, though, scooping up and down and making the phrases increasingly long and unusual. I hesitate. "Sing" he says. I don't think I can do it, but the fact he does makes me happy and willing to try. It reminds me of my piano lessons, when my teacher Mrs. Waxman saw possibilities in me that I couldn't see. That's a gift.

Varanasi (a.k.a. Banaras) is at least 6,000 years old and considered by Hindus to be the holiest city. I've been told that for millennia, though, there wasn't actually much of a civilization here; it was considered an auspicious place to worship or to die, but not to engage in anything distracting from the truth of life's ineffability. The intentional prominence of Varanasi's cremation sites on the Ganga's banks are to this day a constant reminder of the inevitability of death.

While this may seem an austere view, it's not meant to be depressing but rather a reminder of how precious is every living moment. I like Dhrupad because rather than seeking to amuse, it reminds us through its challenges and beauty of some of music's deeper possibilities. Its purpose, according to the Dagars, is "seeking not to entertain, but to induce deep feelings of peace and contemplation in the listener."