The Role of the Conductor

This interesting TED lecture makes some important points about the role of the conductor. Overall, Itay Talgam emphasizes the idea that the conductor does not create precision through absolute control; the togetherness of an ensemble is highly dependent on the communication that occurs within and among the ensemble.

Itay Talgam on conducting

Finnish pronunciation

Here is a good 10-minute tutorial on how to pronounce Finnish:

Finnish Pronunciation

pictures from Choir tour

I'm on tour with the Grinnell Singers. On Tuesday, we drove from the desertous inland town of Richland, through the Columbia Gorge to Portland. We stopped to hike at Multnomah falls along the Columbia river. Here are some pictures from our hike. Everyone was so photogenic in the shady light under the falls; even my iphone made some great pictures.

Helen in Irkutsk

Dec. 19, 2009 8:20 am

We’re on the 4:20 train, pulling out of the station in Karsnoyarsk, headed for Irkutsk. Yes, you read it right; it’s 8:20 am in Krasnoyarsk, but we entered a new time zone when we stepped on the train. All along the Trans Siberian, to avoid the confusion of seven different zones, the clocks are coordinated with the time in Moscow. This morning is the mildest day since I arrived, with a light snow, no real bite to the air. We’re hoping that this weather follows us east. We’re in second class, where the beds are configured like the train in Some Like it Hot: rows of bunks in two levels. A short, uniformed woman with Asian features checked our tickets and gestured for us to enter, welcoming us tersely with the number of our seats: “Twenty five.” “Twenty seven.” We whispered as we moved our things about, settling into our bunks in the dark cabin, amid occasional snores, other whispered conversations, muffled announcements over the PA in the station. As the train gains speed, the light grows, and the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk are dimly visible; gusts of snow smear the passing shapes of factories, power lines, telephone poles. For the first couple of hours, we see improbably large, strangely configured pieces of heavy machinery along the road, and an almost continuous thread of buildings. By noon we are in more open country, with great crowds of birch trees pressing in against the tracks. Further in the distance, their delicate upper branches are washed out to gray by the dusting of snow – faint brushstrokes semi-transparent against the pure white of the hillside.

Here's a picture of celebratory New Years' ice house being built in Listvyanka, a town on the banks of Lake Baikal

Atlanta

Here we are in Atlanta on a long layover before our flight to Manaus. (In the picture from the left, Angela, David Campbell, Karen Lowell). We fly through the night and arrive early in the morning. The sattelight picture of


Brazil looks like it's covered with red popcorn--thunderstorms across the entire continent spread evenly, not in a frontal system as in North America. It looks like the rainy season has begun.



-- Posted from my iPhone

Smolensky and Rachmaninov

As we prepare to perform portions of the All-Night Vigil, I thought I’d offer some information on the work as a whole. Rehearsal time is so precious; I tend to avoid doing a lot of talking. There is a lot to say about this music, however, so this blog is a useful alternative. –These are meant to be rather informal comments just to give you some background.

Rachmaninov’s Vigil can be seen as the culmination of large-scale cultural project begun roughly in the last quarter of the 19^th century, and continuing until 1917, when it was abruptly and brutally shut off. The Moscow Synodal School was the primary focal point around which this campaign took place. Rachmaninov dedicated the Vigil to Stepan Smolensky, and it was Smolensky, more than anyone else, who spearheaded the exploration of Russia’s musical past, and the invigoration of Russia’s indigenous musical culture. Pavel Chesnokov, in a private letter, writes about Smolensky,

The [Moscow Synodal School] where I studied from age seven to eighteen, was headed by a prodigious musician, a profoundly educated man and the first expert in the field of ecclesiastical chant—Stepan Vasilievich Smolensky. Smolensky reformed the Synodal School to such an extent, placed scholarship at such a high level, provided for the Synodal Choir so well with its celebrated conductor Vasily Sergeevich Orlov, that the School began graduating the best choral conductors, and the superb performances of the choir compelled all composers to write works for the church, thereby giving birth to a ‘new direction’ in church music. (While he was director of the Synodal School and Choir, Smolensky was at the same time a professor at the Moscow State Conservatory, teaching the “history of ecclesiastical chant.” His pupils include: S. Rachmaninov, Yuri Sakhnovsky, Gliere, and others.)

Moreover, this very same Smolensky, besides his great work in the school and with the choir, also collected old manuscripts of church music. For this purpose, he was often sent by the synod on journeys to monasteries and abbeys, from which he gathered his main materials. He collected about two thousand manuscripts, and each manuscript is a thick book in wooden bindings covered with leather.[i]

Chesnokov refers to the great achievements of the Moscow Synodal Choir, which was indeed a spectacular ensemble. Elsewhere, Chesnokov makes it clear that the ideal choir that he describes in his book on choral conducting had its embodiment in the Synodal Choir under the direction of Orlov.

Knowing that you are unlikely to read an overly-long blog posting, I will draw your attention to four brief points: 1) Rachmaninov’s use of ancient Russian chant in his work should be seen as part of this larger project – indeed, many view the Vigil as the culmination of this broad campaign led by Smolensky. 2) Rachmaninov takes these spare, simple, austere chants, and, by bringing together harmonic vocabulary from European musical traditions, and adding elements of his own distinctive stylistic voice, he creates a new synthesis. 3) Rachmaninov and choral composers of his generation tended to treat the choir as an orchestra of voices. The Russian church has always forbidden the use of instruments in worship, so in the Russian choral tradition, the choir increasingly came to take on the techniques of orchestral writing: multiple octave doublings, the fullest possible deployment of the choir in terms of its range, etc. 4) The spectacular achievements of Russian choral music were brutally suppressed in 1917. The magnificent Synodal choir was dismantled; sacred music was severely repressed during the Stalinist era. The destruction of this tradition is one of the most devastating cultural losses ever to occur in the world of choral music.

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[i] Quoted in Milos Velimirovic, “Some Letters of Pavel Chesnokov in the United States,” in Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham, ed., Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 264.