Way In #1: Masterclasses

What makes the difference? Classical music exists as a chain of interpretation linking composer to performer to listener, each bringing their own unique context and perspective. Masterclasses work because they strengthen these connections in real time, showing us how seemingly small changes in the performer's interpretation can have outsized effect on the listener's connection to the composer's music.

Composers and Performers: Elgar and du Pré

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 his recordings 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 it that the composer—a great pianist in his own right—even stopped playing it himself.

But I would give the prize for “Piece Most Synonymous with Performer” to Jacqueline du Pré’s version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Like Gould’s Goldberg Variations, du Pré brought the Elgar from obscurity to Billboard charts. Like Horowitz, she inspired generations of eager young cello students (teenage me included) to flock to the piece. And du Pré’s personal story—from the sweetness of her romance and marriage to the dynamic pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, to her tragic retirement at age 28 and passing at age 48 from Multiple Sclerosis—formed an aura around the Elgar concerto, a piece now inseparable from her memory and 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—a recording they’ve grown up with.

Performers and Audiences: Zander and Haas

In this “interpretation class,” conductor Benjamin Zander coaches Daniel Haas on how to form a more direct connection with both the music and the listener. Then, we'll hear Du Pre's performance in this chapter's “Pocket Concert.”

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 entire performance, perhaps because the Elgar concerto is new to them. But at some point in their lives, every classical listener—more often than we’d 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 this phenomenon in his 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 that 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, what matters is 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 I find that Haas's playing is infused with something that makes me feel the composer's intentions, not just hear them.

In some of these moments, many cellists might be thinking, “but du Pré did something different here”—a trap that all music get caught in at some point or another. And it's true that many of her detailed choices are different, as we'll hear later, but she arrives at the same destination of connecting Elgar to audience.

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. ^💬

This last excerpt focused on strengthening the connection between music and interpreter—this next focuses on the link between interpreter and audience. Here's the more tender second theme:

Bravo. At the time of this writing, the cellist Daniel Haas is now a professional composer and cellist with the Renaissance String Quartet. Zander's mastery, and now his student's as well, demonstrate what happens when the interpretation chain becomes aligned.

As we discussed, 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.

A pianist can play every note that's written on the page, but miss the mark if they can't connect to the listener. Or they might wow an audience with empty music that's forgotten the next day.

And a listener can hear one of the greatest performances of all time, but they might just not be in the right state of mind for the music to leave an impression—even something as simple as a stomach ache can pull you out of the music.

In Musicophilia, the neurologist Oliver Sacks relates how after his mother passed away, “my feelings froze and I fell into what is inadequately called depression.” One day he caught a phrase of Schubert playing from a basement window and suddenly felt alive once again—“Schubert and only Schubert, I felt, was life,” he writes.

A few days later he paid a small fortune—“a small price to pay (as I put it) for my life”—to attend a performance of Fischer-Diskau singing Schubert's Winterreise—a song cycle called by journalist Richard Capell, “70 pages of lamentation on lamentation.”

And yet he was left cold—imagining that the other audience members must have been faking their emotion out of respect—until the next day the reviewers unanimously praised Fischer-Diskau, one of the historic masters of this music.

“I was demanding that the music work, where experience had shown me that demanding never succeeds,” Sacks reflects. He quotes E.M. Forster:

Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken.

“Difficult” Music

A page from Messiaen's "Contemplation of the Church of Love"

Masterclasses can be especially helpful for music that isn't easy to grasp on first listen.

My first glance at Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus was a shock. Rhythms had to be deciphered like a trigonometry problem, and the notes, spread out over three staves (as opposed to the usual two) had sharps and flats that seemed like they were sprinkled with a salt shaker. A far cry from romantic Elgar.

It was my first year at Stanford University, and I had just begun studying with only my second ever piano teacher. His welcome was a spot in a recital where his students would each play movements from Messiaen's Vingt Regards. The piece is a religious meditation, written during Paris's liberation from the Nazis, four years after Messiaen was interned at a German prisoner of war camp. It was a modernist masterpiece—or so I was told.

I felt lucky to be given the movement about silence, which sounded easy, and then unlucky when I looked at the score and saw there was very little actual silence, and then lucky again when I saw the much more difficult movements that my friends were playing.

But as I memorized the piece, the seemingly random notes began to coalesce into something that sounded like contemplation. 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.

A great performance will make sense of the messiness on the listener's behalf, extracting a low level concept like a chord with the notes C, E♭, D, and F into a a higher level concept like pain. And a masterclass can show the listener the difference, too.

In this excerpt, Joanna MacGregor coaches pianist Ji Liu on the Regard de l'Esprit de joie, the contemplation of the spirit of joy.

Here she makes sense of the pile of notes to reveal shapes and 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 we did with the Elgar, let's also hear a more tender moment of Messiaen, in which Mary 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 went through one ear and out the other might still put me to sleep, but more like an enchanting lullaby than a lecture—a small nuance in playing that can substantially change an audience's unknowing enjoyment of the music.

And all these differences come from musicians faithfully reproducing sound from the same ink on the page.

“Classical” Music and Living Composers

There is no generally accepted definition for what makes music part of the “classical” tradition—but for me, it is exactly the tradition we've been exploring: the passing down of ideas from composer to performer to listener. ^💬

The ink of a classical composition is permanent but silent—utterly dependent on a performance to realize its potential. This is unlike painting, where the viewer can look directly at the artwork, or pop music, where the audience listens to the singer directly. When a composition is brought to life repeatedly, we can say it has entered the classical repertoire. ^💬

So we can't help but wonder—how do composers feel about having a middleman between them and the public? Surely there's a “right” way to play that they had in mind?

In a masterclass from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, she discusses giving her interpreters freedom even of the choice of instrument (a flower pot). Her feedback? She thanks them for choosing 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”.

Eduard Steuermann, one of my teacher's teachers, once played Alban Berg's meticulously notated piano sonata for a lesson with the composer.

Berg began the lesson, “I hope you ignored all my markings.”

Masterclasses with living composers are unfortunately few and far between (the masterclasses, not the composers). Luckily, we have recordings of composers like Debussy and Rachmaninoff which show them taking tremendous liberties with their scores. In live performance, Rachmaninoff would go so far as to skip parts of his Corelli Variations depending on whether the audience was bored:

Not once have I played these all in continuity. I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation… In one concert, I don't remember where—some small town—the coughing was so violent that I played only ten variations (out of 20). My best record was set in New York, where I played 18 variations.

(For some reason, bored audiences cough a lot, something that all classical musicians have experienced. Much has been written about this phenomenon, which remains a mystery to me, and is well beyond the scope of this book…)

But not all composers have embraced this empowerment of the performer.

“Don't interpret my music—just play it!” instructed Ravel, a contemporary of Debussy.

Stravinsky went further, declaring interpretation “the root of all errors, all sins, all misunderstandings that interpose themselves between the musical work and the listener.”

Perhaps if Stravinsky and Ravel had lived later in the digital era, they would have split from the classical tradition, released records instead of scores, and left future cover bands to figure out the notes for themselves. Fortunately, they have performers like Sviatoslav Richter, who declared “The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer's intentions to the letter.”

I'll leave you with a couple performances of Ravel's Jeux d'eau (Fountains) for your perusal that demonstrate the different approaches:

With YouTube, Spotify, and the like, we may now easily choose both the composer and the interpreter that speaks most to us. In the interpretation chain from composer to interpreter to us the listeners, the hardest link to change is ourselves.

The Rabbit Hole

Videos of masterclasses and orchestral rehearsals abound from the great interpreters of every instrument, several just on different approaches to Jeux d'eau. For more Zander, you could try this class on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (which has a similar problem to the Elgar), in which Zander takes an already “finished” performance from Yoojin Jang and Dina Vainshtein and offers an alternative interpretation.

For something completely different, here's a technically focused masterclass on 21st century vocal repertoire, Mezzo-Soprano Sasha Cooke teaching “I am Harriet Tubman, Free Woman” by the contemporary composer Nkeiru Okoye (with student Rayna Campbell).