Way In #1: Backstage

I once invited some non-musician friends to a masterclass in which I played some very modern sonatas and interludes for prepared piano by John Cage — pieces in which nuts and bolts and erasers are inserted between the piano strings to turn the piano into a percussion section. They, like me, were skeptical about whether they would get much from the event, but by the end they were fully engaged, asking all kinds of questions about how it worked and saying how they found the performance more engaging as the masterclass went along.

For me, the most eye-opening masterclasses are the ones that start with a student performance that has no obvious faults but is not exactly life-changing to those listening. The audience might think to themselves, “That was a great performance but I didn't feel much. That must be because I don't really get the music.” Or they might think, “That was really impressive. Surely that's as good as this music can get.” Then the person leading the masterclass injects something special into the performance, and the listener thinks, oh wow, now I see.

And so, a great masterclass can unlock the power of interpretation for the listener in two ways. First, as the teacher points out emotional and narrative ideas to the musician, the audience begins to recognize these elements for themselves, building their own interpretive vocabulary. Second, the listener comes to understand the nuances of what I call the interpretation chain — from composer to performer to listener, each bringing their own unique context and perspective — and see how seemingly small changes in the performer’s interpretation can have outsized effect on the listener’s connection to the composer’s music.

The Elgar Cello Concerto

There are a handful of classical works that are inextricably linked to their performers. Glenn Gould so “owned” Bach's Goldberg Variations that I listened to it for ten years before hearing anyone else play it. Sergei Rachmaninoff declared Horowitz “the only player in the world of my Third Concerto,” and legend has the composer even stopped playing it himself.

I would give the prize for the piece most synonymous with a performer would to Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto and the cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. Like Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Du Pre brought the Elgar from obscurity to Billboard charts. Like Horowitz, she inspired generations of young cello students (myself included) to flock to the piece. And like Gould and Horowitz, Du Pre’s story — the sweetness of her romance and marriage to pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim followed by her tragic retirement at age 28 and passing at age 48 due to Multiple Sclerosis — has added to the aura around a piece now virtually inseparable from Du Pre, now immortalized in film, ballet, and opera.

The performer’s chief job is to form connections both with the composer’s work and with the audience, thereby connecting the audience to the composer. This is an especially difficult task when the performer looks at the printed notes and imagines somebody else’s recording that they’ve grown up with, not just Elgar, but Elgar + Du Pre. I think for many of us we can never un-hear Du Pre's story in the Elgar's music.

In this masterclass, which he fittingly calls an “interpretation class”, cellist/conductor Benjamin Zander coaches Daniel Haas to form more direct connections — both with the meaning of the music and with the audience in the room. Afterwards, we’ll see Du Pre’s performance.

Communicating Music and The Interpretation Chain

Here’s the first two minutes of Haas’s performance, with Dina Vainshtein playing the orchestral reduction on the piano. I encourage you to watch until your mind wanders.

Some listeners I'm sure were fully engaged for the full performance, especially if the Elgar concerto is new and fresh to them. But at some point in their lives, every classical listener — more often that we would like to admit — has a moment when the music becomes a wallpaper for our thoughts, or as composer Erik Satie called it, “furniture music”.

Zander demonstrates in a TED talk:

It is so important for listeners — especially new listeners — to be able to say, “that didn't keep my attention” without it feeling like a pronouncement on the education of the listener or the value of the composer or classical music as a whole. But when as listeners we can't see anything wrong with a performance, when it just “sounds perfect,” it's easy to jump to these conclusions because we can't unpack why.

This is the crux of Zander's teaching — music is storytelling, and, critically, about communicating its story to the audience. It is not telling a story into the ether. Artist Marcel Duchamp said, “A work of Art is completed by the Viewer.” It doesn't matter how “good” the playing is — the only thing that matters is whether the people you're communicating with are moved — in other words, the connection from composer to performer to audience.

I love some of these moments — that the music is something to be with, not something to play. And for myself, I find that the playing is infused with something that makes me feel the composer’s intentions, not just hear them.

Zander, who conducts the Boston Philharmonic and Youth Orchestra, has an unmistakable teaching style. As much as his words hit home, it is his body language that injects passion into the playing — that is to say, he is conducting.

When people ask me if musicians at this level really need a conductor, I often compare it to a soccer coach. Would the great soccer teams still be good without their coaches? Absolutely. Like a coach, most of the conductor’s work is behind the scenes, in rehearsal. There are some obvious moments when a coach or conductor makes a difference in the moment — a coach might make a substitution; a conductor might change the tempo (in an extreme case like Boulez's Éclat, the conductor even determines the order of the musical passages, but this is rare).

More often, as a coach sets the tone for a team in the locker room, you can see just how a conductor can communicate the emotional essence of a piece just by their way of being. Even from behind, an especially demonstrative conductor can be exciting for an audience to watch, but the true measure of a conductor is in the way their work (including in rehearsal) affects the musicians on stage, and through them, the music we hear — another link in a chain of interpreters.

Now let’s skip ahead to some material which requires a different treatment — the tender second theme.

Bravo. At the time of this writing, the cellist Daniel Haas, is now a professional composer and cellist with the Rennaisance String Quartet. Zander’s mastery — and now his student’s as well — comes from the alignment of what I earlier called the “interpretation chain” — one of the most basic facts of classical music but too often overlooked. There are three primary parties involved — composer, performer(s), and listener(s). If there is any disconnect along the way from one link in the chain to the next, the music won’t achieve its maximum effect.

A composer can write a piece that musicians love but that fails to resonate with audiences, or that audiences would love but no musician wants to play. A pianist can play every note that's written on the page perfectly, but miss the point if it's not communicated to the listener. Or they can play purely for the audience and get a standing ovation but if the notes they were playing said nothing interesting to begin with, it might be forgotten the next day. And a listener can listen to one of the greatest performances of all time, but if they're not open to what the musicians are trying to say, it still might not leave an impression.

If you don't enjoy a performance, there can be lots of reasons. Maybe you just don't like the notes that were written. Maybe you would've liked the notes played by someone else, but the interpreter just didn't make you feel anything. It can be difficult without knowing the piece to know whether the disconnect is with the performer or the composer. This is also why the internet trolls and music critics who claim to that a performance or piece is “objectively bad” can be so infuriating. Or maybe the you that was listening at that point in time was thinking about an argument or a stomach ache and wasn't in a place to be receptive to it. Everything has to go right. But when it does — when a great piece of music meets an interpreter who takes its message and speaks it directly to a receptive audience — music can be magical.

The Long Play

From time to time, I'll recommend a longer stretch of music to listen to in one sitting. This time it's Du Pre's Elgar, at least the first movement. It may not always make sense to listen to these longer works in the flow of the reading of this book, so feel free to come back to them later.

Du Pre's choices are not identical to those we’ve just heard, but certainly she inhabits the music fully. As Daniel Barenboim, her husband and conductor in this recording, once said, "[Du Pre] was so free, emotional and carefree – not careless – that perhaps she represented what many people in England wished they could be but didn’t quite manage to be."

And to the New York Times, “The greatest musical joy was to play together with her. I think we complemented each other. She had an abandon that was very contagious, and I loved it.”

“Difficult” Music

Masterclasses which help take the lens of the performer can be especially helpful for music that isn't as easy to understand on first listen.

When I first got to college, my teacher was assembling a program where his students would each be playing movements of Olivier Messiaen's religious meditation Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jesus, written towards the end of World War II during Paris's liberation, four years after Messiaen's 9-month long imprisonment by the Nazis. This was the first time that I had played “modern” music of this complexity — inscrutable rhythms and groups of notes that often seemed unrelated to any traditional key (we call this atonal harmony). Certainly it was a far cry from the romantic Elgar I was learning just a few months prior. I was just glad that we were dividing up the movements so I wasn't tackling all 2 hours by myself.

But as I learned the Regard du Silence, the seemingly random notes started to coalesce into something contemplative and occasionally even profoundly meditative — notes that I once found random started to make sense to me. And I realized that the rewards of “difficult” music are often related to its cost — it requires a willingness from both interpreter and listener to engage and probe and not give up. And when randomness coalesces into meaning the result can be deeply satisfying.

But the music gets much thornier than the Regard du Silence, and can often sound unpleasant. In this excerpt, Joanna MacGregor coaches pianist Ji Liu on the Regard de l'Esprit de joie, about the spirit of joy.

Here she makes sense of the pile of notes to reveal the melody, the shapes, and the syncopation, which amount, ultimately to a higher-level impression: joy. To the modern ear, the final version can even find parallels to the ways that joy is expressed in jazz.

As before, let's hear a more tender moment in Messiaen as well, in which the Virgin gazes upon her child.

To my ears, after playing this passage “like singing to a baby,” the repetition goes from monotonous to meaningful, and the undulation of the melody begins to feel intentional. What before felt “just boring” to me, might still put me to sleep, but this time it feels enchanting as a lullaby rather than dull as a lecture.

In these examples, we can see that there's a deeper, more specific brand of mellowness or of happiness that goes beyond the excellence of musical, well-prepared students.

Living composers and “classical” music

Masterclasses with living composers, though few and far between (the masterclasses, not the composers), can demonstrate the full range between what's written on the page and the possibilities for performance. In Caroline Shaw's case this comes down even to the choice of instrument — where she hopes for a “casual, pedestrian clay flower pot” that doesn't say “here's my classical instrument” but instead “here's what I have in my garage”.

In the recorded era, we have copious examples of composers like Debussy and Rachmaninoff whose own recordings show them taking liberties with scores. Eduard Steuermann, a graduate school teacher of my teacher Natalie Ryshna, once brought the Austrian composer Alban Berg's meticulously notated piano sonata for a lesson with the composer. Berg began the lesson, “I hope you ignored all my markings.”

A classical composition is an artifact, usually ink on page, permanent but silent — utterly dependent on a performance to realize its potential. When such an artifact is brought to life repeatedly throughout time, it enters the classical repertoire. This opens the door for present-day compositions of all styles — from symphonic film scores to electronic avant-garde works with graphical scores — to join the classical tradition. ^💬

Not all composers have embraced this implied trust between composer and performer. If the recordings of Debussy and Rachmaninoff show them taking considerable liberties with their scores, their contemporaries and compatriots Ravel and Stravinsky dissented. “Don't interpret my music — just play it!” instructed Ravel. Stravinsky went further, declaring interpretation “the root of all errors, all sins, all misunderstandings that interpose themselves between the musical work and the listener.” And many performers follow suit — the pianist Sviatoslav Richter once said “The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer's intentions to the letter.” ^💬

Perhaps if Stravinsky and Ravel had lived later in the digital era they would in fact have split from the classical tradition, released records instead of scores, and left future cover bands to figure out the notes for themselves. ^💬 Musicians and audiences are glad they didn't. Yet even Stravinsky eventually softened his stance. New York Times Critic Anthony Tommasini tells the story of Sir Colin Davis performing Stravinsky's “Oedipus Rex.”

After the concert, Stravinsky asked Sir Colin, ''Young man, why did you take Jocasta's aria so slow?'' Sir Colin answered that he was following the metronome mark. The composer replied, ''My boy, the metronome mark is just a beginning.''

The rabbit hole

Videos of masterclasses and orchestral rehearsals abound online from the great interpreters of every instrument. For more Zander, you could try this class on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, where Zander takes an already “finished” performance from Yoojin Jang and Dina Vainshtein and offers an alternative interpretation.

For something different, like a technically focused masterclass on 21st century vocal repertoire, try Mezzo-Soprano Sasha Cooke teaching “I am Harriet Tubman, Free Woman” by the contemporary composer Nkeiru Okoye (with student Rayna Campbell), in which Cooke shows a drill singing with the nose plugged to make sure that the air is being used efficiently for the singing and not “leaching” through the nose.