The Short End of the Stick

The thing that intrigues me about this question is that it is directed to conductors. It is certainly true that conductors, especially Music Directors, often do get to plan programs, but there is no necessary connection between conducting and programming. Most of us have served as cover conductors for a number of years, and you never get to choose the repertoire then. When guest conducting, you may be asked your opinion, but you may not. Guest conducting at short notice almost always involves taking on a program as already set.

I suppose the asking of this question to conductors is part of the assumed blending together of the roles of conductor and Music Director. This is, I think, a peculiarly American institution, although it is now common throughout the world. In the early days of classical music development in America, activity would usually crystallize around some pioneering fellow from Europe who had a missionary zeal, and knew very clearly what music he wanted to present, and how he wanted it done. He would probably raise the money too, and so naturally all these tasks fell to the same person – the one central mover and shaker.

But those times are largely past, and just as with many other arts organizations, there is no inescapable need for the artistic director also to be the chief performer. It is generally not the case in Ballet Companies, where the artistic director is most likely a dancer who has retired from the stage. It is not often the case in Opera Companies either, and clearly not in theater companies, art galleries, and so on. More and more there are orchestras which are players’ cooperatives. The BBC orchestras are run by a central non-performing oligarchy, and there is the Intendant system which governs many organizations in Europe.

Perhaps the biggest reason for identifying programming with the ‘vision’ of the Music Director is the marketing angle. It is helpful, from the audience’s point of view, for there to be a recognizable figurehead, seen as the inspirational leader of the whole troupe, and from whom it is assumed all wisdom flows, and from whom the great ideas pour forth. Now this is just for public consumption, of course, as it is never as simple as that. But it generates another area where there can be strong player resentment towards conductors. If it seems to the players that the conductor has carte blanche about repertoire, and gets all the glory for the excellence of, say, the principle horn and the principle clarinet, and gets his face all over everything – well, it can make the players feel dis-empowered. And that is a shame as it adds to the frustrations of the playing life.

Some orchestras have sought to correct the unreality of this star system by deliberately publicizing the individual members of the orchestra, “making the orchestra the stars” as some put it. I certainly laud the idea and the intention, but it doesn’t always work as powerfully as we might hope. For one thing, you cannot legislate popularity. The public won’t necessarily be hugely impressed by someone because we tell them that they should be. It’s certainly worth doing, and I support it. But often, the popularity of a conductor is not really because he craves it, although he probably does, but simply because he is visible. Most people are primarily visual, and so they need something to look at. And at a concert, the conductor is the most interesting thing to look at simply by virtue of the fact that he moves about the most, and the most continuously. Even more star power accrues to solo pianists, violinists, and vocalists, of course, but they are not usually there all the time, and throughout the concert. So the notoriety of the conductor may not be deserved, but it doesn’t arise because it is actively sought either. It just happens because of the psychology of the audience.

Marketing departments are not foolish when they exploit this. Making a huge fuss about a new Music Director is a very sensible thing to do, quite apart from the merits of the case, and the Music Director is the logical person to take responsibility for, and to present before the public, the new season. The Music Director can show public commitment to the season as unveiled, and express intense and unreserved enthusiasm for everything in it.

Obviously, form the conductor’s point of view, it is very nice to retain as much control over programming as possible. But sometimes it must be confessed there is a lot of ego in programming, as when yet another orchestra decides that the world needs its own complete Mahler Cycle – often ending with the Resurrection just before the Music Director leaves!

The whole notion of “vision” is both good and bad. It is bad in that it is a sort of ‘weasel word’ like excellence, innovative, educational. All of these are invoked to mean very little, amounting only to the exhortation: “Let’s all get really enthusiastic about this without enquiring into it too closely.” If I were to be totally cynical for a self-indulgent moment, I would say that conductors have vision because search committees always decide to hire people with vision. Bingo!

But here’s the good side of the same little sleight of hand. As the great musical provocateur Hans Keller used to say, “Anything that is foolproof is also genius-proof.” In other words, if committees and planners and musicians always demand explainable, logical, sound rational reasons for the decisions that are made, we shall all be the poorer. The arts are not to be captured in an algorithm or an equation. In the end, the honest answer to the question of how a particularly brilliant program came about may well be simply “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Committees and review panels are opportunities for members to be critical and logical and analytical, but that is not the way really inspiring ideas come about. Nobody understands inspiring ideas! If they did, they wouldn’t be inspirational!

So even though I think there is marketing opportunism in the ‘vision’ thing, I approve and support it, because it is the way a planner (whether the conductor or not) can come up with great ideas without having to explain herself. As a flip side of this, I am not personally in favor of the current vogue for ‘thematic’ programs, since I think they are precisely a way of inserting some trivial or logical idea as the determining factor for quality. It makes the program logical and rational, but the theme rarely has anything of importance to do with the music being performed, except in a trivial external way. Picking an overture that has some connection with Shakespeare, just because that is the theme, has no bearing whatever on whether it will be a greater or lesser musical experience. For how long, during the playing of an 11 minute overture, can you keep thinking to yourself “Ah yes, this is Shakespearean.” And if you do, the next thought will be “so what?”

However, to look on the flip side of that, (you should read my blog post “there’s a committee inside my head” – I have at least three contradictory opinions about everything) thematic programming is useful for marketing departments, and the difficulty of marketing is not to be underestimated. The essential problem with selling concerts is that you only have the tickets to sell, not the thing itself. By the time the concert actually exists (after the initial downbeat) the tickets are all a wasted asset. You cannot sell a ticket based on the quality of the concert, only on the expectation of the quality of the concert. This is why thematic programming can be useful – because it looks on paper as if it will be more interesting that a random selection of pieces. That is also the reason why the same very famous soloists keep re-appearing; because purchasers have high expectations of them, much higher expectations than they have of a completely unknown, but in fact even more brilliant, soloist. We can only sell tickets based on the season brochure and press coverage. So in using thematic programming it is necessary to do two things. a) make sure the theme is a real one and an intriguing one that you might want to buy a ticket for. b) make sure that the concert will seem terrific without any reference to the theme whatever. It has to sound great to the person who never ever found out that there even was a theme. A theme can never repair weaknesses in a program, so it’s a bad idea to allow weaknesses in, in order to consolidate a theme.

Well, so much for my preamble. What goes on in planning a program? One of the things that I think always causes discontent is the secrecy around it. The question seems to imply that. What can we explain to those who do not go to the board meetings?

Well, the first thing is that the reasons for secrecy are largely legal. If it gets announced publicly, even unofficially or by accident, that Pavarotti is going to give his first posthumous recital in Athens Nevada on February 31st, that might just constitute a contract binding him to do so, or binding the orchestra to dig him up. It can happen, and there is a whole area of law, called promissory estoppel which deals with things like this. So, in order to negotiate with soloists and composers and guest conductors, it is essential that it all be confidential until a deal is struck. Leaked information can wreck things. I have experienced it myself, where you suddenly see yourself advertised as appearing, but no fee has been offered yet. What do you do? Grin and bear it, or complain and look publicly like a money-grubber? So confidentiality has to be preserved, and if the players are involved rather than conductors, they will have to keep confidentiality too. And since the budgeting and repertoire all interlocks, it means that it all has to stay confidential until it is buttoned up. So there is no intent to create paranoia.

At last! I get to the bit about what you put in the programs. From all the above, it is clear that freedom is limited. You want to have certain soloists, or at least certain classes of soloists – brilliant but affordable – pianists / violinists / cellists / vocalists / all the rest – that is the generally accepted sequence of audience appeal. You’ll want to have, over a period of years, the standard repertoire represented. If a person moves to your town and subscribes for 5 years, then moves on, they should be able to expect to hear quite a bit of Beethoven and Brahms in that period, plus all the other usual suspects. There tends to be an unwritten rule that less well-known pieces shall not come back too soon. So, for instance, it would be OK to do Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto again after only two years, but probably not the Barber. Whether this is a valid rule of thumb I do not know.

Familiarity is crucial for happy listening. It isn’t a matter of politics or an aesthetic agenda, it is just a matter of the neurology of perception. You perceive much more of what you know than what you don’t know. Think of language. You may know a bit of French, but as it wooshes by you only pick up a bit. But fast talk in English you get easily. So it is with music. If you know the New World Symphony well, you actually hear much more of it than you hear of a piece you are encountering for the first time. We tend to underestimate the difficulties caused by novelty. At a concert, the audience may be hearing a piece for the first time, but we on stage are not. We have been rehearsing it for a week! And lots of us may have hated it the first time through too.

Well, I shall stop there, else I shall just be duplicating the wise words of others. In particular I am not going to touch the issue of modern and modernistic music, as the alienation between audiences and composers during the past 60 years has been a major catastrophe for classical music, and it will not be solved by mere goodwill. That is a topic for a book rather than a post.