Beethoven’s 5th Symphony never made me cry before.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a reason why it’s possibly the most memed musical motif of the orchestral literature. It is awesome for many, many reasons, but in this rehearsal it was extra special. The stretch from March 1st, 2020 to this Monday (March 15th, 2021) marks the single longest period I’ve gone without hearing, or participating in, a live orchestra since I picked up an instrument 24 years ago (I know, I’m dating myself).
I think I can speak for a lot of musicians when I say that live music has made me the person I am. I’ve learned to work with others despite disagreements over subjective details i.e. note lengths, phrasing, whether everyone else was flat or just I was sharp (they were all flat :-D). I’ve learned that I’m not the most important person in the room, despite my ego. I’ve also learned what it means to strive for the ideal and come to terms with my own flaws. Listening to the curators of acoustic art, the keepers of time, the top-mark skill-operators, the sheet-music translators, and masters of precision micro-muscular athleticism, has turned me into the engineering creative mind that possibly keeps my ADHD at bay, or at least satiated for a little longer, yet drives me to better myself.
2020, specifically Covid-times, robbed a lot of us of those experiences that not only feed the soul, but expand the mind and make us greater than the sum of our parts. When I was a student at Curtis, fellow alum Carl Lenthe, one of the trombone professors at Indiana University, gave a masterclass for my studio. He likened making music with another person for one hour (duets) to being worth two hours of practicing alone, or even four hours of singular-shedding with an hour of quartets. I was really hoping I could cash in a year’s worth of practicing with a week with an orchestra, but he believed that the correlation fell apart somewhere after having to tacet for long stretches of time. Darn. Though you may not be working on a concerto for a recital, or how much air pressure does it really take to get “the transition into a sforzando Bb3 in sharp 5th position coming from an interval greater than an octave at a piano dynamic in the style of…”, you have to listen just as much, but in a different, less egotistical way to create something of beauty and respect that you’ll be proud of (with other people at the same time).
54 weeks of self-centered “improvement” is tough without a little orchestral soul-food, if not at least for some camaraderie, or being a cog in a -hopefully sometimes- well-oiled machine, or that hygge* you get from a completely in-tune balanced chord. It’s a long time to wonder “why do people keep hating on artists? We’re just trying to honor literally one of the only two things that’s endured the test of time: human expression and aqueducts” or “we’re all in this together, why are money-value pushers valued more than people who actually create something out of nothing, with skills that take literal years to develop.” It’s a long time to have to think that you’re a second-class citizen.
* Yeah, I know this technically isn't the right definition.
But, it feels right.
These “improvements” of mine have included, but are not limited to:
- Learning to program (JavaScript and Rust).
Go check out my WIP: Flarp.duckchase.com - Improving my video editing.
Go check out my YouTube: O Magnum and As Vesta Was.. - Learning to mix/master audio for videos on YouTube
- Learning just what in the world all those knobs on an audio compressor do (I’m still fuzzy)
- Learning to arrange music.
Go check out my Patreon for my ‘modular quintets’ - Learning to record in an untreated not-studio
- Working part-time for a major tech company to pay NYC rent
while not being paid as a musician - Finally getting over my fear and composing music!!
*ahem...*
Patreon - Not going to the gym for another extended period of my life
Ok, that last one was -definitely- not an improvement, but at least I walked a lot to my friends, Katie and Billy, a whopping 30+ blocks north. During the winter, those were some interestingly frigid hangs in late-evening Central Park to avoid the groups of people. But the hygge was real, even then. Thanks friends!
I am uniquely grateful to the Copenhagen Phil, for letting me audition*, and taking a chance on me by offering me a position, and subsequently allow me to end this agonizingly long artistic dry-spell. Though I came abroad in December of 2020 in the hopes of playing in January, Corona reared its ugly crowned head with its variants and locked-down Denmark for another 2½ months. This fleshed out (flushed down?) the rest of the year since 1 March ’20.
* My European audition story is in my drafts and will be released soon. For fear of self-aggrandizement, I felt telling the story of
“hey, look at me, look at what I did during a literal pandemic” seemed…boorish.
So, it’s being re-re-re-written.
Check back later, or follow me on social media to be notified.
Funnily enough, I’m following in similar footsteps as Mr. Lenthe, one of my favorite trombonists because he is an actual artist and musician, and not just an immensely capable operator of the brass tubing pitched in B♭. Towards the beginning of his enviable career, he made the move to Europe to play in the Bavarian State Opera, while in my case, I headed to Germany’s northern neighbor, the parliamentary monarchy of the Kingdom of Denmark. I’ve been told that the current monarch, Queen Margrethe II (the first female monarch of Denmark since Margrethe I (ruler from 1375-1412*)) has *quite* the eye and talent for costume designing. I haven’t personally seen it, but knowing of Nordic design and the extremely deep tradition of ballet here (Royal Danish Ballet and NYCB are considered cousin companies), I’m sure it’s a match made in Valhalla.
* Holy cow, men had ALL of the power for nearly 600 years? Talk about job security. Thankfully, that finally changed when they allowed women to inherit the throne in 1953.
The stereotypical chords, phrases, tunings, articulations, etc. that make up the 5th of Ludwig van, have never ever, ever, ever, ever, had so much more “greater+than+the+sum+of+their+parts” to me than they did this Mandag. The power of all those people working in concert somehow hits you like a ton of bricks when all you’ve felt for the past year is Netflix and a laptop screen. Tugging at my heart’s strings, I somehow forgot that I’ve been yearning for the orchestra, the feeling of oneness and being part of a greater whole. 2020 illuminated to me that I’ve been tired of “exceptionalism” and “dog-eat-dog” and “grease-the-wheels” and that just hearing 40 or so people coming in and doing something together, fully coordinated, is like watching a brand new city being built in a microsecond*. While a society develops over years and decades, a sound wave propagates through a medium and develops over fractions of a second, interacting with every atom in its path in some way or form. It’s truly astonishing to me that in those ways or forms, we can literally warm the walls of a concert hall through friction by the sound waves of a violin, oboe, or trombone**. I love that cooperation can profoundly affect more than just meets the eye.
* Sometimes you go to the city, sometimes it comes to you.
** Albeit to an infinitesimally small degree, but the science is there!
(I hope.)
Trombonists are the luckiest witnesses to orchestral music. Not only do we occasionally get to engage in the performance, but sitting in my favorite listening position, the back row, often gives such a nice blended orchestral sound from a good room acoustic with the added benefit of details by proximity to the direct-sound. When normality resumes, if your local orchestra has seats near the position of the trombones, I highly recommend it. You’ll get a great balance of the room:direct ratio that I think rivals the conductor’s position. In fact, ours might be better as the conductor doesn’t get the benefit of the room acoustic, it’s just sax* and violins up there.
* Ok, maybe not so much saxophone. Unless it’s…a jazz orchestra, or Mussorgsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, or…ok there are a good number of pieces with saxophone, much to my chagrin.
Since having the Copenhagen Phil inject those eight intoxicating notes of the 5th Symphony directly into my core, I am beyond excited to get my regular dose of orchestral soul-food, or as I will now call it in *Dane-ish*: sjælmad. It rhymes, or at least I think it kind of should. The ‘D’ in ’-mad’ sounds like an ‘L’, or an un-aspirated ‘TH’, or… whatever it is…I’ll have to work on it.
Thank you to everyone in København for being amazingly caring, thoughtful, and welcoming. Thank you to the Copenhagen Phil for caring about music, their musicians and not treating them like second-class citizens… as some organizations are wont to do. And of course, thank you to the fabulous musicians for making me cry again. For a good reason.
Vi ses,
Brian
P.S. Thanks Mom, for teaching me how to spell “Tchaikovsky” for that alphabet worksheet I needed to fill out when I was a tiny sapling. The answer to “who’s that?” sparked an interest that planted my roots strong and deep.