Pre-Concert Talks and Creating Community
1. Pre-Concert Talks and Creating a Listening Community
People have a deep hunger to understand classical music. So I was discovering. I continued developing new UCLA Extension classes and “usual suspects” kept enrolling. Did I mention classical music listeners are the most interesting people? Friendships formed. People went to concerts together. More surprising, some participants eventually “graduated“ themselves from my classes, so confident and passionate that they actually joined performing arts Boards or volunteered for orchestras and new music groups!
Violinist Mitchell Newman heard one of my classes and urged the LA Philharmonic to try me out. So began my UpBeat Lives, where many of you first met me. I also presented pre-concert talks for the New West Symphony and the Santa Monica Symphony. These talks have to be brief, so I focus on fun windows into each piece. I make you clap and sing themes to get the music into your body. I take you through my AudioMaps. I play scores on the piano and pretend we’re together in a graduate seminar discussing deep ideas, just without heavy music jargon.
One of my most favorite talks: teaching an audience of 400 people to sing the 12 tone theme from Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto. Over and over! All while I played different accompaniments in styles from Haydn to Strauss. I am convinced that audience followed the Schoenberg concerto better than any audience in its history After my talk, a man approached me indignant. How dare I talk so long about the Schoenberg piece and ignore the Mozart work on the same program! Then he broke into a smile and introduced himself. Larry Schoenberg, Arnold Schoenberg’s son.
People wanted to learn in more depth, so I offered private lectures in a recurring series that initiated another generation of friendships and good times. In a series, I always look forward to the moment in people’s faces when “the spark” kicks in and they suddenly know they are hearing the music. This usually happens usually around week 8. And once they get the bug, there’s no stopping them. In a year or two, they’re pretty sure they hear better than I do. I love it.
That’s the adults. But I also conduct students ages 8 to 18 in the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra. Curiosity to understand music is age independent. These students are not professionals. Yet they transcend their limitations and create convincing interpretations that don’t sound like a youth orchestra. As I write this, I’m just beginning to talk to them about how Sibelius takes molecules of notes to gradually build the most magnificent themes. We’re performing the Sibelius second symphony in Carnegie Hall June 22, in case you’re around Many alums of our youth orchestra have become established professional musicians. In fact, one of them, Niv Ashkenazi, is now our principal violin coach in the orchestra!
All wonderful stuff. But scattered. The community of my musician friends and contemporary concerts was distinct from the community of my youth orchestra which was distinct from the community of my educational talks. I never envisioned a way they could be integrated. But then 2020 came. I fell off a ladder. The world fell into a pandemic. And from the deep lonely isolation we all experienced, I found a way to bring everyone together. To be continued…