Director's Notes

March 22, 2008

The other day the BSA Board of Directors and staff held a retreat to discuss our future together.  The current president, Holly James and new Executive Director, Gena Wales effectively planned a day that invited positive participation and was deftly facilitated by consultant Beverly Kincaid.

One topic they asked me to address was artistic programming.  In this column I have commented on many issues and perhaps even touched on this before, but wanted to comment on collective experiences that go into a concert such as the one coming this Saturday.  Keep in mind the planning of a season down to the individual concert beings well over a year and a half back from the downbeat- something similar to the gestation period of an elephant!

The live concert experience with humans playing acoustic orchestral instruments has no parallel in the performing world.  Because it is a unique opportunity to hear a live orchestra, my planning always begins with placing myself firmly in the audience with my favorite 1000 friends in my midst.  What would we experience?  What shall grab our aural attention and sustain it for an hour and a half?  What will inspire?

The programming for this Saturday’s concert has personal and sentimental attachments for all our musicians in some way; I can address those in my history. Liszt Les Preludes reaches the farthest back to my first season with the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony playing third oboe as a ninth grader. Though I had no idea what the score looked like, I basically memorized all the sounds around me because of the intense repetition of rehearsals youth orchestra experience. The next longest attachment comes from this same period when my brother was rehearsing with my mother for the state solo ensemble competition. The horn licks in Strauss Horn Concerto #1 are forever implanted in my memory- interestingly- as being accurate, but as they say “hind sight is 20/20”.

The Dvorak Symphony #7 comes from the early period in my conducting career.  About 20 years ago I was asked to participate in a conducting workshop in Austin, Texas with this piece.  At the time we were living in Orwell, Vermont (half way between two orchestras I had one in Massachusetts and one in upper state New York) in an old antebellum farmhouse.  Throughout the coldest winter months, I poured over the score with the distant churning of the auger as it fed the coal brinks into the furnace two stories down in the dirt-floored basement. Above the kitchen in the attic where I studied, it had been used as lodging for field hands that later became Union soldiers in the Civil War. I remember looking up from my score into the dark recesses wondering about residual spirits.

Why delve into all of this? We as humans are attached to the present, past and future simultaneously.  With musicians, our experiences of the past help shape our performances of the future.  We build upon these each time we play a selection delving deeper into the meaning of the music.  My first time impressions of these works are just 1/60^th of what will collectively be forged together with the next BSA performance.  However, the performance will have one less “experience” as one of our violinist of many years, Briggi Elwell, passed away recently; this concert will be dedicated to her.   

Perhaps it will be the first time you have heard this repertoire, certainly Dvorak’s New World is much more popular, however, just as they say on Amazon.com - if you like the 9^th you might enjoy the 7^th.  This concert is generously sponsored by The Center for Bone and Joint Surgery with Dr. Margaret Baker (who is also a horn player and my sister).  Hope to see you at the Symphony!