How to wind an orchestra up in a first rehearsal

Actually there are quite a few ways. One really good one, though, is to stop every eleven bars to say something uninspiring about playing the staccatos shorter, starting the crescendos quieter, using softer sticks for the timpani, or any of the other dozens of things that good musicians will figure out for themselves once they've got a bit of an overview.

You do this mostly to cover up for having stopped because it fell apart due to your lack of clarity; not daring to draw attention to this by either apologising or attempting to blame the players, you try to act like you stopped for something else. Already made uncomfortable by this failure, you start to obsess that the players are watching you like hawks and noticing your ineptitude with the grim relish of a connoisseur sending back corked wine, which they are. Never all that secure about your conducting to begin with, this latest confirmation of your self-doubt makes you unable to do the simplest thing; you can't give a clear upbeat and even if you do you aren't sure the tempo you hear is the one you meant, or if the one you meant was even right anyway, and maybe the orchestra misread you because they have a different tempo in their heads, and maybe in fact they're right and you were imagining it wrong, and all this self-analysis when you should be concentrating on listening to the rehearsal makes you lose concentration and you realise you've had to stop again, but you were so busy thinking about what had gone wrong with the upbeat that you haven't been listening and can't think of anything to correct, and you look down at the score trying to find a commonplace mistake that you weren't sure if it was wrong but somebody probably did play it wrong somewhere and even if they didn't they might do next time, and on you go, making it worse and worse. And you can practically hear them asking each other, 'why is this guy conducting us', and well, hell, why wouldn't you hear it, everyone else can. As you pick a place to start two bars further forward than the previous time so it feels like you're making progress and count out the measures for the orchestra, you see out of the corner of your eye that the normally docile woodwind players are exchanging looks, and you try to tell yourself it's a private joke that has nothing to do with this rehearsal but you remember your own days playing in an orchestra and you know that isn't true.

Well, we've all been there, conductors and players alike, and knowing what it feels like from the other side I have more sympathy than it sounds like just now. But although the reasons outlined above account for most of the first-rehearsal stopping, and actually most conductors doing this know perfectly well that the most productive thing would be to crash through with only the most critical stops, they do still sometimes forget that and manage to convince themselves that talking to the orchestra is useful. Orchestral players know that it isn't. And it certainly isn't when the players haven't got any idea of the music yet. Why not?

It seems to me that we are wired up to learn music (and other things) in a way that resembles the appearance of a Google Maps image loading on a slow smartphone. Very blurry at first, then kind of pixellated with some patches of green visible, then suddenly the hit of satisfaction as the image rights itself and sharpens up. And you know also how while it's loading the phone is apt to freeze if you try to drag the map an inch or two to the side, but once it's got the area loaded into the memory you can drag, zoom in, zoom out, search for the closest place to buy charcoal or display all the bus stops served by night buses and the phone will keep up with your impatient fingers, gliding effortlessly through hyperinformatic space. (If you're reading this in a couple of years' time and can't believe people used to struggle through life with technology this deficient, imagine how I feel.)

So, but this is what learning music is like. You can't find the shortest route from ATM to off-licence until you've got the whole picture loaded. It is most especially not like pictures used to download in early versions of Netscape c. 1992, a beautifully defined strip of sky, followed by a perfect treetop, eventually a few strands of hair at the top of the tallest person in the picture's head, and an eternity later, legs, feet, ground. (Probably what changed this is that the men writing the software for these browsers thought about the kind of pictures they most often wanted to look at on the internet and realised it was not in their interests to spend their then-precious bandwidth allowances on the detailed image of people's head-tops before you knew whether you liked what you were getting much lower down in the picture.) Music cannot be learned this way. You can only get to the detail by going through the overview; you just need to play something through a few times, eventually things start to click into place. Conductors who understand this and just let you play get results much faster.

It's getting late and I have another rehearsal to look forward to tomorrow morning so I have to stop writing pretty soon but just one further thought. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about whether or not you're a musician; we've all experienced that feeling of not really knowing enough about something to make any connections, the sense that reading another article on the same topic will just double your overall understanding of it from nothing to nothing, the questioning whether you will every really actually get the thing enough to really be comfortable with it like other people seem to be. But equally you will know what I mean that at some point things just click somehow and it all does make sense, and not only does the next thing someone tells you about the topic seem to make complete sense, but it connects with something else you remember hearing about it that at the time you thought wasn't going in at all because it didn't really seem to mean anything, and then someone asks you to explain it to them and all of a sudden you find that you are doing that and sounding rather well-informed.

Well but then the brain must be able to store an incredible amount of not-yet-connected pre-knowledge long before it's in a position to make sense of it. That feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music for the twelfth time and you can hear what phrase is going to come next before it does, even if someone turned the player off, it only comes after quite a few playings. After the first time - with hard music, anyway - you would not be able to complete any phrases like that, or remember any of how the music goes 15 minutes after listening to it. You feel just as if you'd never heard it at all. And yet something has just remained, because you are still one-twelfth of the way to the point where you will be hearing it, and after the second time - when you still may not be able to remember how any of it goes - you will be one-sixth. I find this incredible. I do not find it difficult to accept that my brain can store a lot of information that I have access to and can marshall in a conscious way. But that my brain can also be storing a whole load of information that I can't get at and can't in any way sense is there, but that will at some point with the right sensory inputs be movable into this active conscious domain - I find that amazing.

Composers: show some respect

When I write music I am fantastically careful about the preparation of parts. I try extremely hard to make sure that everything is prepared and presented so well as to make life as easy as possible for anyone who will be learning, playing or conducting my music. Why? Firstly on selfish grounds, because they probably won't have infinite preparation time and so any time they spend deciphering unclear notation takes away from learning to play my music better and will mean a less good performance. Secondly out of respect for the players, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude that they have chosen my music ahead of the squillions of other pieces out there, and the least I can do to repay them is to give them something legible to play from. Thirdly out of pride that I was taught how to produce properly notated music and am able to do it and I don't want anyone to think I'm one of the people I'm about to moan about. Obviously despite all one's efforts the occasional mistake creeps in. All the more reason to try harder; without one's best efforts the number of mistakes will rise astronomically.

I get really impatient when I find myself learning music by other people who haven't taken the same care that I would expect of myself. This probably isn't the place to try to prepare a notation handbook and so I'm not going to attempt an exhaustive list of everything you ought to know if you're preparing music for performers, though such handbooks do exist and it would be nice if composers who prepare their own materials consulted one from time to time. But just so you know what I'm talking about here are a few examples.

1. Cautionary accidentals. Not providing these is the single biggest 'f*** you' to performers that composers are guilty of. If you have a G# before the barline and a G natural after the barline then the natural sign is NOT optional. If in doubt, put one. It's also not patronising to restate an accidental towards the end of the bar that we've forgotten since the beginning because it's so chromatic in between. Better too much information than too little.

2. 8va lines. Please remember: the number of objects the eye can instantly see and know the number without counting is five. Throw some matches on the floor and try it. After five you have to count. Reading music there isn't time to do this. Do not use more than five leger lines.

3. Consistent placing of staves on the page. In a given section or ensemble, if I am following the part of Bob the Builder and I turn the page, his part should continue at the same vertical point on the page. If that means having an empty stave for Tinky Winky, who has 5 bars' rest so doesn't sing anything on that system, that's fine. Constantly juggling the parts so that you have to keep moving the eye up and down is a complete nightmare. This isn't a hard and fast rule; you have to be intelligent about it. But if we are talking about an ensemble that lasts, say 50 bars, and involves 8 singers, hold the number of staves constant. If it's 200 bars and 2 of the singers only have 3 lines then you might not. This applies more to vocal scores, for full scores you probably wouldn't use empty staves.

4. If you don't use computers and produce handwritten scores, that is fine on principle. But engraving music by hand is an art. It is highly skilled expert work for a professional and if you are a career composer then you probably haven't had time to learn it properly. Not by most of the evidence available, anyway. Give it to someone who knows what they're doing. If you must do it yourself, do not take shortcuts. Leger lines must be perfectly spaced. Accidentals in chords should be in the right order. Spacing of rhythms within the bar should be sensible (this is also a very frequent problem with computer-produced scores). Sharps, flats and naturals should look unmistakeably different from one another. Noteheads should be big enough to read. Stem lengths should be constant and the stems should be straight; so should beams joining eighth-notes and smaller. Text should be legible and the music should be given extra space to accommodate text rather than the text being squashed. If at all possible the text should be in just the original language but if you must give a singing translation please be consistent about which way round the languages appear.

This may all seem obvious but you would be amazed how consistently these rules are broken by very well-respected and well-known composers. The most infuriating thing as a repetiteur is that the orchestral score and parts are almost always produced by computer and are legible, but then the vocal score is done by hand - do repetiteurs and singers just not complain loudly enough? I find it mildly scandalous that we should have to sit there counting spidery leger lines while the better-unionised orchestral players get computer-prepared parts.

Computers are not the solution to everything, of course, and they bring their dangers too. You can always tell an amateur whose music is mostly brought to life by the playback algorithm of his notation software by notation that is technically correct and perfectly readable to a computer, but for a human brain much harder to read - see rules #1 and #2 above, for starters.

That said there are also aspects of how the mind processes information that are more computational than hand-written scores give them credit for. Most of the things I mention in point #4 cause difficulties not because it isn't obvious what's meant - of course we still know what four sixteenth-notes are when the beams joining them aren't quite straight. But the mind is much better than we realise at processing information subconsciously and when things are neatly, predictably and mathematically presented it can get on with this without having to take up too much conscious thinking power. When things are comprehensible but require the brain to engage a conscious analysis circuit, it makes it much harder.

I could go on and on but I think you get the idea. When I see the parts that we are mostly presented with for new music my usual first reaction is: is he not ashamed? Do his cheeks not burn with the disgrace of such unprofessional work? Does he not recoil in fear of what his colleagues will think of him for producing this? And then as I am forced to accept that the composer must in fact be sleeping perfectly well or he would do something about it, I think: well, sod you, then. If you cared that we play the right notes rather than just making it up you would produce decent parts, so perhaps you just don't. I feel insulted that somebody who probably walked of with tens of thousands of euros for this is happy to let me struggle along reading this spider scrawl.

And then in the end, because I'm a professional and a perfectionist and a soft touch, I sit there sweating it out and learn the music properly all the same and I resolve never to play anything by that composer again.

Lost in translation

Why do so many expats have two greeting messages, in their native and adopted languages, when you ring them and get their voicemail? Do they worry that people who don't know what 'please leave a message' is in German won't know what to do?

Too easy for children, too hard for adults

If you spend any time working in the music profession you are fairly sure to encounter a sage who will tell you, in the same kind of tones that people use to tell you the tea has more caffeine than coffee, that you may think Mozart is the easiest music, but really it's the hardest. The title of this post is what the great pianist Artur Schnabel said about Mozart's piano sonatas, and we all know what he means. Mozart's music is superficially pleasing to the unquestioning listener and, a little learning being a dangerous thing, one may dismiss it as facile and uninteresting before one has the emotional maturity to appreciate the depth of beauty and the understanding of the human spirit it contains. I went through this phase and lots of people do. Some never emerge, and they are probably the most legimitate targets of the waggish wisdom I describe above.

What makes Mozart harder than Brahms is that it is underspecified. The page of music contains few instructions aside from the notes. Unlike much romantic music - particularly opera (one page of La Bohème contains more slow down/speed up instructions than the whole of the Marriage of Figaro) - the score is not a recipe whose instructions you can simply follow, add water, stir, bingo. You have to figure out for yourself what is going to make the music come alive. So some adduce from that that this makes it easy to conduct Puccini, because you can make it sound like the piece the composer composed without making any decisions for yourself.

Well, to a point, perhaps. But it depends on the individual; most of us probably find it easiest to perform the music we best understand and feel the deepest connection to. For me, that is Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Britten, Shostakovich... others too, but not (or at least not yet) Puccini, Brahms, Wagner, Strauß. I plan on getting to them later in my career, but right now I'm quite sure that I know how a Mozart phrase is meant to sound (and am perpetually driven crazy by the fact that I believe hardly anyone else does - more on this in a later post). With Puccini I don't know just from looking at the page and seeing all those rits and accels what the phrase means; if I listen to a couple of recordings I might think, oh, right, of course, that's what he means - but if you need to get it from a recording that isn't really the best start for conducting it yourself. Sometimes people think it's just obvious that it goes a certain way and they think they've always known that but they've forgotten they learnt how it went from other people's interpretations. (There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The aural tradition is important. But I generally feel it's purer to get a feeling for the music from the printed page first - you can always go to the recording later. In an ideal world, this is; when learning music in a hurry, recording submersion is a strategy I often use. Again, more on this later.)

The point I'm making is that for me, right now, Mozart most definitely is easier than Brahms. I've had older people (mostly people who didn't know quite as much about music as they thought they did) say exactly that to me - 'ah, you want to conduct Mozart because you think it is easy, you don't realise how hard it is' and I wish now that I'd resisted that more vigorously. I should have said: it's precisely because I appreciate what makes it hard that I can do it.

Rocking the boat vs being too passive

A common but to me unnatural situation in opera houses is what the Germans call 'Nachdirigate' - conductors taking over a piece midway through a run of performances after the busier or more expensive big-name conductor leaves to go and do something else. It's actually a very good thing for young conductors (or repetiteurs wanting to get into doing more conducting) because it increases the opportunities available to the less experienced of us who aren't yet getting offered our own productions, so I'm not complaining. But the trouble with it is that conductors in this situation do not generally get to rehearse with the orchestra and will have limited (if any) time to rehearse with the singers, so they can't really come in and do everything differently from the person they're taking over from. Some people would argue they shouldn't do anything differently - same tempos, same beat patterns, same fermatas. Most people would say there's some room to make it your own but few people, I think, would suggest you can be as free in this situation as you could with your own production.

Suppose you're the conductor taking a musical rehearsal (accompanied by piano) with singers who have done 6 performances of a piece and you're taking over for the last two. Well, first of all, you're lucky to be working in a house that affords you this luxury. But are you, really? What is the rehearsal for? The singers know what they're doing, they have done it enough to have got used to doing the piece a certain way, they have sung it into their voices at your colleague's tempos and while they should be professional enough to cope with small deviations, they will be unlikely to give performances as assured as usual if they are too focused on having to change everything. Remember that anything you change is going to be new for the orchestra as well and they may also be hard to coax into anything very different.

So how far are you going to try to pull the singers in a different direction? Do you give them a whole load of new ideas about how to sing the role, on the basis that they may need an injection of fresh thought to get back to the level of inspiration they felt before they got into a routine? Or do you take the view that if it ain't broke don't fix it?

There are arguments both ways but I think one thing is clear: you should only say something if you have something to say. I think if you have something new to offer and have a sound musical or dramatic reason for persuading a singer to change their interpretation, there's no reason not to throw it out. They will say if they find it too difficult to change at this stage (or don't agree). But it's a big mistake to start trying to change things for the sake of putting your own stamp on something. That's just as true with something you're conducting from the beginning as with a takeover situation: meddling for the sake of it is never a good idea. One sometimes sees that conductors feel they have to say something or people will feel they're being passive; if they don't specify, they seem to worry, they will seem not to care on way or the other.

The trouble is that there is some truth in this. Really strong musicians with a very clear sense of how the music should go probably won't agree with every aspect of someone else's interpretation. They probably will see things differently and will not feel comfortable doing it a way that doesn't fit their conception. Musicians who are not quite as brilliant - or perhaps not quite as experienced - may have figured out that the conductors who impress the most are the ones who come in and instantly know what they want to change, but they may not (yet) have figured out enough about the music they're conducting to know what needs changing. So they fiddle about so as to look more assured than they really are. It might even be a good career strategy; it would be easy to say that everyone sees straight through it but actually I'm not sure that's even always true. But of course it's not a very honest way to make music.

Listening to music

I only get anything out of music - hearing, playing, coaching or conducting - if I know it really well. This is sometimes a problem at concerts with a programme of new music, or just repertoire I don't know. I try hard to concentrate and of course I can enjoy it on a certain level, but if I can't engage with it from a perspective of familiarity, I find it very hard not to switch off some of the time. If I know the music well, on the other hand, I concentrate extremely closely.

I often envy people who are not like this, either because their powers of concentration are better or because they appreciate music in a more direct way that doesn't depend so much on having a sense of overview before being able to enjoy the detail. (Obviously this also depends on the type of music. I guess I'm principally talking about 'classical' concert music, of any period, though I often find with jazz it's a similar problem if I don't have any prior knowledge of the material/artists.) And I have often felt annoyed with myself and thought, what on earth is wrong with you, you have the unbelievable good luck to be in an auditorium listening to these great artists interpret great music for you and you are sitting there thinking about who you forgot to email and do we need to buy bread. But it's no good. If I want to get more out of it the only answer is to prepare beforehand by listening to recordings, and if possible looking at/playing through a score. Once I'm in there I find it really hard.

It raises the question: what does it even mean, 'to concentrate on music'? What in fact is concentration at all, and is it really meaningful to use the same word for what we try to do in a concert and what we try to do when we drive a car or sit an exam? If any psychologists or philosophers of language are out there I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

This relates to another topic I have a lot to say about, the process of learning music, how I approach it and what it really means to 'know' music. But that will have to wait for another time.

Why people get on our nerves

I meant to write a longer post now but instead I've been doing some blog maintenance, adding some other pages that I read and putting in a couple more networking gadgets to help my legion of avid followers keep track.

Just one quick thought - nothing particularly to do with music but a general social observation. Why is it that some people get on our nerves? I've been idly wondering about this in the context of one or two people I find a bit annoying and I'm pretty sure what it is is that when I talk to them I constantly feel like they demand a particular reaction from me. Either they tell jokes I don't think are that funny and I feel I have to laugh, or they tell me they like something they think I also like with such exaggerated enthusiasm that I feel I have to agree, or they try to engage me in heated conversation about a topic I don't really care about... It's so tiring, and boring, to have to manufacture reactions. People who don't require you to do that are so much more pleasant to talk to.

Related point inspired by another recent encounter: it takes an especially social comfortable person to feel comfortable talking to a socially ill-at-ease person. When people seem very withdrawn and don't want to make small talk the temptation many of us feel is to try to draw them out, engage them... and pretty quickly one is doing exactly what I've described above as annoying behaviour. Why can't we leave them alone? Perhaps because all but the most exceptionally graceful people are discomfited by the way socially awkward behaviour in others draws their attention to their own social dis-ease.