Music Is Theater, Theater is Music
Dean Douglas Lowry delivered the Eastman School of Music’s 2010 Convocation speech on Thursday, September 2, in Kilbourn Hall.
Just a few short months ago — on May 16, to be exact — we sent our next generation of musical leaders out into the world. The occasion was the 2010 Eastman Commencement. Our guest was Clive Gillinson, the Executive and Artistic Director of Carnegie Hall.
Clive began his speech rather inauspiciously, at least from my perspective. He declared to this sea of graduates something along these lines: “In 20 years, 90 per cent of you will be doing something different than what you originally planned.” Understand that the house was packed to the rafters with the parents and families of graduates, and our Commencement speaker then says, “90 per cent of you will be doing something else in 20 years.” I remember thinking, “Clive better be good on the rebound.” Which he was, of course. After all, he runs Carnegie Hall. And his provocative message really wasn’t that our Eastman graduates would abandon their dreams; rather, that those very core musical dreams may at some point take on a different form. Those graduates might discover other gifts that maybe had been under-nourished. Or, their true musical calling might be another other activity in music altogether. Of course, they might in fact end up doing precisely what they set out to do at Eastman in the first place.
Despite these potential turns, what’s common among us is an insatiable desire to be immersed in music. Eventually, we want to end up in some mode of musical activity that comports with our own authentic natures, what we do best. Coming to terms with the authentic nature part, of course, takes some time to evolve. It’s not so much about plot line, as we like to think, but about discovering the authentic drama in ourselves and our music. So Clive Gillinson’s message to our 2010 graduates rings even more true today. We’re on the verge of a new academic year, we’re on the verge of a new era in music, and we’re on the verge of a new Eastman evolution. This convocation is a celebration of that odyssey.
We firmly believe, of course, that one of our primary responsibilities is to help each individual music student find their voice. Be it a composer, singer, violinist, whatever, each individual’s character resonates with music differently, as a function of their talents, capabilities, and personalities. This discovery doesn’t revolve around the question of what you want to be, but who are you? What’s your compelling drama?
Discovering one’s unique drama begins, of course, with finding one’s unique voice. Being unique, however, is not enough. (It’s actually pretty easy to do.) Being authentic involves a deeper quest. The great artists and scholars and teachers are the most authentic artists and scholars and teachers. There is no gap between their persona and what and how they do … what they do. If we are authentic, we begin to speak our own basic musical truths.
Gaining authenticity requires knowledge and considerable practice. It also requires a lot of what I’d call smelling the roses: experiences that neutralize the constant cacophony and teach us to be fully awake for the right things at the right times. It means learning how to pay the highest-quality attention, without judgment or evaluation or obsessive need for a story line. At that point, we are peering into a higher purpose.
To explain this, let me pose a question. We lead frenetic lives, jammed with signals and messages that frequently leave us over-stimulated and under-focused. We are agenda-driven, and so many of our activities fall into just that: an agenda. When is the last time you actually sat down and listened, really listened, to a piece of music without an agenda attached? Listened, not because of a theory assignment, or an article you’re writing, or a piece you’re going to perform or conduct; not while in your car, making dinner, or text-messaging. Instead, for pure and simple pleasure: to a Brahms piano sonata, or the Bach unaccompanied partitas for violin, or any other work you admire? Listened … virtually agenda-less; when you’ve turned off the verbal chatterbox that’s constantly conceptualizing and analyzing. It’s a real challenge, and maybe an impossibility, to immerse yourself in that work, removed as much as possible from even your own perspective. But it’s a necessary exercise in our reach for authenticity. It’s what Pema Chödrön calls, “allowing for a gap in your discursive mind.” A state of equidistance … from just about everyone and everything.
Of course, ridding ourselves of judgment runs counter to every way we’ve been taught, and is probably even against our evolved natures. Our instinct for judgment is probably a strengthening mechanism, although I suspect psychotherapists would say of musicians that it’s probably a function of our enormous insecurity. We do carry it to extremes, to the extent that sometimes we are unwittingly our own worst exhibitionists.
I remember years ago going to a performance of the Pina Bausch Dance Company. Pina Bausch was a trend-setter in what was called the Tanztheater movement, a unique mix of drama and dance. I attended this performance with a very good friend. I’ve written a fair amount of music for dance and drama, and I looked forward to the experience.
I was captivated instantly, until we got about one minute into the first piece, at which point my friend, an excellent but feisty choreographer, took instant umbrage with everything on stage, every choreographed moment, every gesture, every creative concept. She just hacked it to pieces. Now my friend had strong, well-developed artistic feelings, and was very, very good at what she did. But at the end, I was exhausted, not by the performance, but by the blitzkrieg of criticism.
A few days later my wife asked me how it went. I said that I enjoyed it until the rant of judgment began. Now spouses, for some reason, frequently exercise considerably more editorial license than I think is implicit in the marriage contract, and so my wife said, before walking off, “Well, now you know what it’s like to sit next to you at a concert.”
I know we’re kind of a catty group, we musicians, and I suppose part of the fun of going to a concert is to pass puerile judgment on everything from what the performer is wearing – Can you believe that idiotic necktie? For crying out loud, the coat doesn’t match the pants; what was she thinking when she decided to go on stage with those stiletto heels? – to even less substantial aspects. I have sat in an audience next to violinists who decide to go on the attack at one of their own on stage, critiquing everything from sloppy bow technique to hair-do.
Each one of our professions has its own little bag of scalpels. Pianists can be pernicious about another pianist’s posture, or the predilection for gratuitous grunts, groans or physical gestures of deep, personal pathos. Trombonists tend to shrug – at just about everything. Oboists like to say, “Boy, is she having a bad reed day.” Then there are the composers, who are about as charitable as singers when it comes time for hyper-analyzing the poor soul pouring out his or her deepest angst on stage.
Ironically, musicians sometimes deprecate themselves, inventing jokes that at some subliminal level express suspicions of just what society thinks of us. There’s the old joke about St. Peter. He was interviewing three heaven-bound hopefuls. To the first, St. Peter asked, “What did you do on earth?” The man replied, “I was a surgeon. I helped the lame to walk.” St. Peter said, “Well then, go right on through to the pearly gates.”
To the second, St. Peter asked, “What did you do on earth?” “Oh, I was a school teacher. I taught the blind to see.” “Ah, good, go right on through to the Pearly Gates.”
To the third, St. Peter asked, “And what did you do on earth?” He replied, “I was a musician. I helped make sad people happy.”
St. Peter replied, “Oh, good, you can load in through the kitchen.”
This notion of trying to get away from the base chatter seems so critical in the quest for musical authenticity, even if it’s just for peace of mind. I had the good fortune of spending four days in the Adirondacks a couple of weeks ago. Being pretty much a creature of America’s stark western skylines — the Bitterroots of Idaho, the Rincons of Tucson, the San Gabriels of southern California — or the shores of the Pacific, I discovered a particularly deep peace at this location up on Upper Saranac Lake. I’d been told that this was what this place was all about.
It was a friend’s summer house, graciously loaned to us for a few days. Our hosts were getting ready to leave us behind. Knowing that I was a musician, they were carefully instructing me on ways to not burn the house down. They had a couple of simple house facts. One was that there was no TV in the place. The second was something I had to learn the hard way. My host, noticing my Blackberry sitting on the dining room table, said, “You know, you can go ahead and try to use that thing, but up here you’re not gonna get any signal.”
For a couple of days I felt like I was lashed to the mast of my chair, writhing like Ulysses sailing past the Isle of the Sirens as I lunged for my Blackberry. Those first couple of days I had to peel off layer after layer of nervous anxiety. Then, on day three, at 5:45 a.m., sitting out on a 12 foot by 12 foot dock in a weathered, grainy Adirondack chair, I got a feeling of that eerie emptied-out refreshing center I was told you get in the Adirondacks. Down to the place where real music resides. The lake that morning was glass-like, nature’s sparse sounds muffled by surrounding groves of maples and oaks and birches and box elders, a hint of orange-hued rouge shading some of the leaves, signaling that fall was around the corner.
I heard the man in the house next door quietly come down to the boathouse. He dove into the lake, then crawled out and quietly got into his small canoe. He rowed past me, barely nodding, as if to respect the sacred code of Saranac: I won’t bug you if you don’t bug me. I sat watching fish leap out and back into the lake, learning a lot about the ripple effect. There was something protean about that re-ignition and re-connecting. In an hour or so there would be water skiers zooming by, of course, towed by roaring, 350 horsepower Evinrude outboards. But later, in the evening, things would wind down to a deep, intense silence, and upon going to sleep, I’d hear only one sound: the odd call of a single loon.
That’s the smell-the-roses part.
The second part has to do with the essential drama of music. Over the summer, I was, for some strange reason I can’t explain, drawn to listen to and study again the Mahler Second Symphony, plus a number of Richard Strauss tone poems. I then began reading a volume of Mahler-Strauss letters. Now Mahler and Strauss were supposed to be rivals, but as I read these letters, I was struck not so much by their rivalry, but by their basic envy of one another.
Mahler was, for example, envious of the way in which Strauss scores seemed to roll right out of the orchestra, even in first rehearsals. Mahler was frustrated by this because when he was going through the torture of preparing first performances of his own symphonies, he felt like he and his music were being stretched out on the rack, writhing in agony in order to get it right. Strauss was, of course, a completely fluid orchestrator; for him, it wasn’t just a question of just knowing the ranges of the instruments, but knowing intimately their technique as well as the authentic voice of the instrument.
As for aesthetic, Mahler was a pick-your-pathos kind of composer. An excellent orchestrator as well, he seemed, though, to be extending to other reaches, even if it meant writing in seven sharps. Strauss was a bit more distant as a personality, very difficult to read, but capable of cutting a wide swath musically and dramatically. He frequently needed the operatic stage for some of his finest moments, yet was dumbstruck by Mahler’s ability to mount these immense pyrotechnic dramatic explosions for the orchestra alone.
And that was, for me, the pivotal intersection. Despite the differences in their personalities, they had a common aspiration. Each admired the other for creating explosive, controversial, sonic drama. This was revolutionary at the time. Both were drilling for drama, musical expressions of the essence of human experience. Strauss’ courage in mounting a work as controversial as Salome was, I suppose, part shrewd career move. A work that featured ample gore and blood in the form of the decapitation of John the Baptist, and a Salome who bore traits of disturbed sexuality and even a bit of necrophilia, would surely get everybody’s attention. And it did. To Mahler’s great credit, he tried to mount this work in Vienna; he was drawn not to its controversy and cruelty, but to the fact that human nature was being stripped down to its raw essentials, and music and theater were the media. But his Viennese censors refused. Nevertheless, Mahler was awed by Salome. It was the drama that got to him.
Both Mahler and Strauss wanted to grip their audience, draw them in, be it through the macabre of Salome or the pathos of the “Resurrection” Symphony. And indeed they did. They were innovators. They were also dramatic engagers. They were difficult, irascible, irrational. But call them what you may, they engaged. They locked on.
And so this is our saga.
For our new students, I suppose it is difficult for our faculty members — at least it is for me — to recall those first few days as a student of music in a place like this. At that stage in my life I didn’t know what my musical dream was, much less a dominant seventh chord. But I do remember being utterly awed at all this music before me. It was like walking into a cathedral in Vienna or Prague and feeling overwhelmed by the Mahler-like density of light and sound.
Amidst all the bustle, it’s easy to forget the basic, inspiring pleasure and purpose of music. And to appreciate the alarmingly unique gift we have of being in this profession. To be here today, to hear and make music in this way — that alone is so, so special.
Discover your own dramatic authenticity. Innovate, and engage. And remember to occasionally seek some deep, quiet space. In other words, discover your own Saranac.
It’s going to be an extraordinary year at Eastman. All of us here are working each day to evolve our own collective, authentic Eastman voice. Welcome to our odyssey.
I don’t know about you, but I am thrilled to be here.
Thank you.