Every August, teachers from across the state flock to Meymandi Concert Hall for the North Carolina Symphony’s Education Concert Workshop. They spend an entire day of their summer vacations learning the repertoire and important lesson plans which they can use to prepare students to attend an NCS Education Concert. Our five teacher authors – Bo Reece, Katie Perkins, Kim Demery, Ann Goldfinch and Melissa Raley – did an amazing job leading more than 160 educators through activities at this year’s workshop. The accompanying pictures capture the excitement of the day.

Each year we try to find an inspiring guest speaker to kick things off and get everyone in the mood for learning. Who could be better than Branford Marsalis? Branford has a reputation as a dedicated teacher in the Triangle and, as those of you who attended our benefit concert on June 8 already know, he is a true friend of the North Carolina Symphony.

Branford did a beautiful job of expressing his gratitude to the teachers for the impact they have on the lives of children.

Later that afternoon, Kim Demery led her students from North Forest Pines Elementary through a lesson plan demonstration for Khachaturian’s Waltz from Masquerade Suite. The objective was to familiarize students with rondo form and if you look very closely, you can see that each child is wearing a hat or necklace with a picture on it representing their section.

After a delicious lunch in the lobby, we could sense a spike in the energy level. Our two authors Melissa Raley and Ann Goldfinch took over and those ladies know how to work a crowd! Here’s where the pictures will say more than I ever could!

An activity planned for Rossini’s Overture to William Tell required the participation of more than 30 people. Through a variety of movements, teachers portrayed the changes in dynamics and overall intensity throughout the storm section.

Here teachers are using Chinese jump ropes and a parachute with bouncing balls in the center controlled by over a dozen volunteers. As the storm intensified, so did the movements. I can tell you first-hand that the balls in the center of the parachute quickly went from mimicking raindrops to golf-ball sized hail! You’ll notice Melissa Raley, our author/presenter, is running for cover!

Our last activity was for Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8, Mvt. IV. Ann Goldfinch paired the main themes from this work with kid-friendly lyrics which depict guests arriving to a grand party. A small portion of those lyrics include: “We’re excited, we must hide it. We’ll have lots of fun!”

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Here’s a music activity you may not have heard of. The world championships of Drum Corps International kicked off with the quarterfinals last night in Indianapolis. Strictly DCI for those in the know, the self-described “nonprofit, global youth activity with far-reaching artistic, educational and organizational influence” is, in short, competitive marching band, born out of the grand traditions of military bandsmanship and traditional drum and bugle corps in the British style. These are formal brass and percussion bands, the brass limited to bugle instruments, meaning only valves. The corps perform 15-minute shows using many different varieties of trumpets. French horns and trombones are replaced by several ranges of mellophones and baritones. Tubas are carried over the shoulder. Combined with often stunning precision between the on-field drumline and non-marching percussionists, and with the color guard adding visual engagement with flags, sabres, rifles or the occasional “other,” the bands create a bold, commanding musical experience that has earned a devoted, if admittedly geeky, following. (Learn more about DCI as an organization and competition below.)

To watch the world quarterfinals, as audience members did last night in over 500 movie theaters nationwide, is to see a rolling interplay between old guard traditionalism and new wave theatricality. Among the old: traditional marching styles, including the stiff-leggedness familiar to anyone who has seen the Changing of the Guard or the high step still practiced by only a handful of college and professional marching bands. The new: big, showpiece numbers putting large props and backdrops on the field. One tradition that has not changed, to even my surprise, is the music. Anyone who imagines that younger generations do not respond to symphonic or classical music do not have to look farther than the young men and women of DCI for a counterargument. Audience members in the coming nights will enjoy tremendous, all-brass adaptations of music by Brahms, Bizet, Borodin, Khachaturian, Philip Glass, John Adams and several of today’s finest film composers, among many others. Two longtime favorite corps have made a point of turning to classical music as a return to their roots: the Madison Scouts offer an impressive Gershwin showcase, while the Santa Clara Vanguard’s 2010 show is entirely the music of Béla Bartók, not the first name in easy-listening classical music or something someone carrying a 30-pound tuba can easily march to (as you can see, with some shakes, on YouTube). Not only are the musical results impressive, edgy, powerful and inviting, they promote high-standard musical performance among some very young amateur musicians, both on the field and in the stands. They also help prove that orchestral music can, as ever, inspire great excitement and strong emotions—not to mention a little friendly competition. Two more nights of championship performances remain; you can watch portions of Saturday night’s finals free here.

A brief DCI primer: More than 8,000 students, 22-years-old and younger, audition for the fewer than 3,500 positions available in top-tier DCI member corps. Almost two dozen corps constitute that top tier, officially dubbed “world class” and ranging from those with lengthy histories of success and service—such as The Troopers, “America’s Corps,” founded in Caspar, Wyoming, in 1957—to relative newcomers—The Academy, from Tempe, Arizona, founded in 2001. The groups perform from June to August in an unrelenting schedule of appearances and competitions throughout the United States, including a recent stop in Rock Hill, South Carolina, home to our region’s own DCI corps, Carolina Crown. Several powerhouses have developed in recent years, namely the two leaders after last night’s performances, the Blue Devils—not Duke, the Concord, California, variety—and The Cavaliers, from Rosemont, Illinois. That does not mean there’s no room to compete. The Bluecoats of Canton, Ohio, have never placed higher than fourth in the world championships. They are currently in third place.

It’s 7:55 pm and you are settled into your seat in the balcony at the concert hall. The lights are about to dim and then you will be transported into a world of pure, powerful orchestral sound. A concert can be a magical and transcendent experience, and there are many people working hard every day behind the scenes to make that magic happen.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on backstage at a North Carolina Symphony concert and just what it takes to present over 150 great performances every year, then please join us for our new initiative this season –we will present a class as part of Duke University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute called “How a Symphony Works: The Mechanism Behind the Music.”

In every session we’ll focus on a new topic that will help participants understand how we bring great performances to concert-goers and a solid foundation in music education to students. We’ll talk about what it takes to run the North Carolina Symphony and we’ll also discuss relevant topics throughout the orchestra industry today. There will be a new instructor for each session, including North Carolina Symphony conductors, musicians and staff members. (Both Grant Llewellyn and William Henry Curry will be among them!) Our instructors are creative and seasoned pros who will bring a wide variety of perspectives and teaching styles to the classroom. Don’t miss it!

Here is a sample of just a few of the topics we’ll discuss and the instructors you’ll hear from during the semester:

Whose Music is it Anyway?
Grant Llewellyn, Music Director

Artistic Administration 101 and How to Program an Orchestra’s Season
Scott Freck, VP for Artistic Administration and General Manager

The Nerve Center and the Invisible Musicians: The Orchestra Library and Librarians
Deborah Nelson, Principal Librarian

All You Need is Love … and Good Marketing
Suzanne McKeon, VP for Audience Development

The View from the Stage: Who are all those musicians, what are they doing, and how did they get there?
David Lewis, Orchestra Personnel Manager and Principal Tuba

The Business of the Arts
David Chambless Worters, President and CEO

“How a Symphony Works: The Mechanism Behind the Music” will take place on Mondays at 11am on Duke’s campus. Registration is open now and ends on August 17th. For more information about how to register, please call the Institute at 919.681.3476 or visit www.learnmore.duke.edu/olli/courses/membership.asp.

ON THIS DATE IN 1829 – the start of snobbery.

"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger." -Dan Rather

One of the most famous melodies in all of music was first enjoyed one hundred eighty-one years ago today, when the Paris Opéra premiered Rossini’s William Tell at the Salle Le Peletier. Closely linked to Friedrich Schiller’s stageplay about the sharp-shooting Swiss rouge’s defiance of the Austrian government, the then five-act epic was initially received with indifference from the public, a familiar story for as old a composing hand as Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868). More alarming was the reaction by the director of the opera, who asked to annul a contract for more works by Rossini only moments after the curtain fell. Legend says that Rossini countered with characteristic gusto. "I’ll cancel the contract at once,” he said, “and if you like, I’ll add that I’ll never write another opera as long as I live." Whether he said it or not, he kept his word.

Facing a high-ranging tenor part and a lengthy runtime even by 18th century standards, artists willing to perform William Tell have often faced a choice between significant cuts or short-lived runs. Paris management began to perform the piece one act at a time; even the composer was informed one night that he’d be seeing only the second act. "What! the whole of it?," he replied. In Rossini’s native Italy, concerns about a work glorifying a revolutionary figure led to marked censorship. The Teatro San Carlo first presented William Tell in 1833 but did not mount another production for nearly fifty years, while Venice did not host the work until 1856. The Vienna Court Opera, by contrast, offered 422 performances of Tell between 1830 and 1907.

The opera was, in the end, a swan song for a composer who had begun composing and presenting opera as a teenager. He had spent the 1820s enjoying the fruits of international stardom, including multiple visits as a dignitary to the orchestral music hotbeds of Vienna, London, St. Petersburg and Paris. William Tell was meant to pave the way for five new works for the Paris Opéra, but even in 1829, Rossini felt that his place was at home with his family in Bologna (his mother had died two years earlier). By 1830—the year of French King Charles X's abdication—Rossini was living in Italy, with a hearty joie de vivre that centered on lavish dinner parties showcasing his considerable talents as a chef. Though he composed several concert pieces in later days, he never returned to the stage, leaving as his last theatrical note a melody now singularly famous for its place in front of a TV show. As famed musicologist François-Joseph Fétis said of William Tell, "The work displays a new man in an old one, and proves that it is in vain to measure the action of genius."

We presented our final concert of the Summerfest series on July 17th and now is the time to plan for the coming season, as we await the return of our musicians in September. In this gap between the orchestra’s performances, I’ll step outside of the Classical music world to write this installation of our Music of the Moment blog. This is a recurring segment of the North Carolina Symphony blog where various members of our artistic team post about some of the music that is on our minds lately.

If you are reading this, you are probably sitting in front of a glowing computer screen, so go ahead and follow the link below and hit play when the page loads (and be sure to click on the button at the bottom right-hand corner of the video screen so that you can view it in full-screen mode.) Then, come back and keep reading.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106471639

How about that voice? He’s mesmerizing, no? Bill Callahan’s entire concert here is charming, albeit in sort of a dark way, but the tune that made me fall in love is “Too Many Birds”, the final one in the set. (Bill Callahan used to put out records under the name Smog and I listened to those in college, but I didn’t realize that he was releasing anything under his own name until my husband, Bradley, played this for me one night a few weeks ago. Thanks, B!)

I wanted to post something here to give Bill Callahan a mention in our Music of the Moment blog series, but I also wanted to draw your attention to NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. For me, there are few better ways to spend a lunch break than to stay put in the office and watch one of these concerts (and be instantly transported far from whatever spreadsheets lie lurking a mere window away.) It’s surprising to hear what glorious sounds these artists can craft in such a lo-fi setting, and while crammed into the DC offices of NPR. You are sure to find listed among the Tiny Desk Concert archives a musician you already love and, better still, someone new who will absolutely transfix you in this intimate setting and then propel you to iTunes or, if you’re lucky enough to still have one, your local record store to buy a new album.

Here’s a little compilation of some of the Tiny Desk Concerts that I would recommend whole-heartedly:

Zuill Bailey
Zuill is a friend of the North Carolina Symphony and one of our guest artists from prior seasons – he’ll join us again, this time as part of the Perlman/Schmidt/Bailey Trio, on the Classical series in September.

Kurt Wagner
Kurt Wagner is the lead singer of the band Lambchop. I’ve been a fan of theirs for years and they are in great company on the North Carolina label Merge Records.

Raphael Saadiq
If you crave beautifully constructed and sleek, but very sweetly delivered, modern soul music, Raphael Saadiq is your man. This is one of my favorites from the site – the duo guitars just kill me.

K’naan
I had not heard of K’naan until I came across his Tiny Desk Concert and he has totally stolen my heart with his song, “Fatima.” Listen to it. Right now. Seriously.

Tom Jones
At 29, I suppose I might be a bit too young to have a big place in my heart for Mr. Jones, but honestly, I couldn’t resist him once I started listening to this performance and it just goes to show you the broad spectrum that Bob Boilen, the curator of this concert series (and host of All Songs Considered) has captured.

Enjoy! And, please post your comments here about which Tiny Desk Concert is your favorite.

I’m often asked by friends and colleagues what life is like during the summer at the North Carolina Symphony’s Artistic Operations and Education Departments. After all, schools on the traditional calendar are out, and therefore we don’t give any of our Education Concerts for elementary school children. Additionally, most of our other programs aren’t as visibly active as they are from September to June.

It’s true, there aren’t as many scheduled public events, but these summer months are busy in a different way. Summer is the time when we lay groundwork for the numerous events occurring in the upcoming season – from planning pre-concert talks and chamber music programs to preparing conductor itineraries and guest artist visas. For the Education Department that includes more than 45 statewide Education Concerts, a couple dozen small ensemble performances, open dress rehearsals, master classes and a veritable cornucopia of instrument zoos – plus much more! To list everything would take too long. For me, summer is one of the busiest times of the year.

The largest project we tackle during the summer is the production of teacher and student handbooks which accompany our Education Concerts. With more than 50,000 students and 1,000 educators using these books each year, these are some of the most significant publications that the North Carolina Symphony produces.

The 70-some-odd pages are authored by four North Carolina music educators who start their work in the spring, after the artistic staff has finished selecting the works for the upcoming education concert program. When I receive the authors’ material in June, it is raw and unformatted. From there I work to organize and construct each lonesome file into something that resembles a book. After that, the two-month-long “hot potato” game between the NCS editors and our graphic design contractors begins. That is what my life at the office has looked like for a few weeks: elbow deep in drafts of the education concert books. What a great feeling it was this afternoon to give that final “sign-off” and send the books to print! The first public glimpse of the books will be at our Education Concert Workshop on August 10.

As an added bonus this year, I’ll have more editing to do in August, when three teams of teacher authors will submit material for our first-ever middle and high school concert guides. I can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with.

Of course, during this time we’ll also be planning the details for more than 14 other education programs. For more information on these programs, please click over to the education pages and read for yourself. (Yes, that was a shameless plug.)

So, that’s a picture of what summer is like for us here in the Education Department office at the North Carolina Symphony. It’s a lot to accomplish over these few hot months of the year, but when the concerts and our other programs start up again in September, it always proves to be more than worth the effort. Enjoy your summer!!

Our 2010 Summerfest season ends at Regency Park this Saturday with a classical blockbuster of a program that I will conduct. The concert begins with music from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. This is indeed grandiose music fit for a King. (It was written for King George II.) By a happy coincidence the next work also has a royal title: The “Emperor” Concerto, the Piano Concerto No. 5 by Beethoven. It is well known that Handel was Beethoven’s favorite composer partly because of Handel’s genius at creating larger-than life effects with the simplest musical means. Think for instance of Handel’s most famous work, the Hallejulah Chorus from the oratorio, Messiah. It packs an enormous wallop when it is excerpted at concerts but its full brilliance is revealed only in the context of the complete work. That’s because for the first 100 minutes of the oratorio Handel has held back from using the trumpets and timpani. When they are finally unleashed in this chorus, the effect is apocalyptic.

The subtitle of the “Emperor” Concerto originated with the first English publisher who with this title correctly caught the majestic tone of most of the piece. But there is more to this work than its nobility and its exterior aggression; the second movement is one of the most intimate and spiritual movements Beethoven ever wrote. In this context it functions as a kind of musical oasis. It is these kinds of contrasts that contribute to the impressive breadth of this piece. Related to this, I recently found a wonderful quote from Schiller that mentions the importance of contrast in an art work: “There must be supreme unity, but it must not detract from diversity. Without a feeling of resistance between the materials in a work it is impossible to produce the perturbations without which any poetic effect is unthinkable.” Beethoven uses his own version of this dictum in many of his works his works in order to create musical scenarios filled with epic emotional contrasts. Think for instance of the strongly contrasting first two themes of his Fifth Symphony. The first theme is an iron fist; the second is a velvet glove. The interaction between these two extremely different temperaments supplies a good deal of the intense drama of the movement. The first movement begins with a “battle royale” featuring alternating brazen outbursts from the competing teams: the piano and the orchestra. A considerable amount of electricity is created by the ever-changing moods and the sheer drama of hearing two equally matched opponents struggling to be the dominant partner.

As mentioned, the second movement takes us to another world of calm and repose. And then, for the very first time in a concerto, Beethoven composed a transition that acts as a musical bridge to the next movement. If the Adagio was a visit to the Elysian Fields, the third movement brusquely yanks us back to Earth. This piece features a galloping rhythm that supports a series of melodies that are athletic but magisterial. Near the end, the orchestra retreats from the scene (the weaker fighter vanquished ?) , leaving only the timpani to accompany the last thoughts of the pianist.

The concert will conclude with Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony. It is a popular work that I first discovered as a middle school student in the late 1960s and have been fond of ever since. I have conducted it only once before, with the Peabody Conservatory Orchestra in 1979. Saint-Saëns was one of the most remarkable of all child prodigies. He began studying the piano at the age of two-and-a-half and wrote his first composition at age three. At 11, he made his performing debut as a pianist. Through his life he developed a great deal of interest in many extra-musical fields such as archaeology, math and classical philology. He was also a talented essayist and playwright. However, it was in the field of music as a pianist, organist, conductor and composer that he was especially gifted. He said of himself that he “lived in music like a fish in water.” And he was proud of his facility as a composer, saying that he created music “as an apple tree produces apples.” This easy facility and his prodigious output have worked somewhat to dampen his reputation as a “deep” composer. Certainly we look in vain in his music to find the kind of intense soul-searching we hear in the music of his contemporaries, Schumann and Wagner. And as for his vast output, I think we tend to unfairly judge the most prolific composers that came after the time of Bach and Mozart. Whether composers leave behind 12 works (Mahler ) or 1200 (Telemann) should not be taken into account when evaluating their place in history. What matters is the quanity of works that eventually become a part of the permanent standard repertoire. And in this area, Saint-Saëns outshines many of his contemporaries that get more respect. His standards include Violin Concerto No. 3, Piano Concerti Nos. 2, 4 and 5, the Cello Concerto No. 1, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Danse Macabre, the opera Samson and Delilah, Symphony No. 3 and “The Carnival of the Animals.”

He led a remarkably long life — from 1835 (eight years after the death of Beethoven ) to 1921 (the year of some of Schoenberg’s finest pieces written in the 12-tone serial style). He was a musical conservative who lived long enough to see the first performances of such revolutionary works as Debussy’s Peleas et Melisande (which he depised ) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (Legend has it that he walked out of the premiere during the opening bars because of Stravinsky’s “illogical” use of the bassoon.)

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"People need to get more music in their lives," says New Yorker Aaron George.
We couldn't agree more.

Read about a fascinating public art installation by British artist Luke Jerram, now on it's first U.S. stop in New York: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/22/545082/new-york-serenade.html

Science’s enthrallment with music and the brain continues. Aniruddh D. Patel breaks down the beat for us in this fascinating conversation with New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus.

Be sure to check out the YouTube video mentioned in the piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s

You won’t believe your eyes.

From the first minutes of our June 8 benefit concert, I think everyone in that sold-out concert hall suspected they were in for a musical adventure like none other. Some three hours later, the audience knew that to be true, having heard an amazing array of music performed by some of the most brilliant artists in the world. I don’t know how to really do justice to what took place, so let me just start by saying thanks to everyone who played a role on stage: our leader Branford Marsalis and his stupefyingly talented pianist Joey Calderazzo, Joe Newberry and his incomparable string band Big Medicine, our NCS string quartet of Rebekah Binford, Karen Strittmatter Galvin, David Marschall and Bonnie Thron that played so beautifully, the unstoppable Phil Wiggins on harmonica, Tina Morris-Anderson and her heart-stopping vocals, our new best friend Scott Ainslie, and of course our own Grant Llewellyn: emcee, host, pianist (!), and guest vocalist.

It’s truly impossible to cite just a few moments as the highlights of what took place on stage at Meymandi Concert Hall, except to possibly say that the moment that Branford’s new recording with Joey comes out sometime next year you must obtain a copy the first day it is available, simple as that. I’m not sure I ever quite recovered from their first four tunes that set the stage for all that came afterward. The evening was a spell-binding musical journey and made for a remarkable tribute to an orchestra – the North Carolina Symphony – that these artists all share as a common passion.

I also want to acknowledge the off-stage efforts of the staff that worked tirelessly to make last night so perfect, as it took the whole team to raise the money, sell the tickets, and make countless moving pieces on stage work together. In particular I want to thank Scott Freck who was at the epicenter of planning everything that took place on stage. Scott, what you accomplished last night makes us all proud to know you and to work with you, and what you gave the audience last night was a true gift. You and your artistic operations team are as good as they get.

As I did last night from the stage, let me also again thank the corporate and community leadership for putting its support behind this concert. From Highwoods’ presenting sponsorship and Greg Hatem’s gorgeous reception at Sitti for the corporate sponsors right down to that very last $20 ticket that was sold behind the stage in Choir Loft 3, together this community raised more than $140,000 for the benefit of the orchestra. Pretty great for a single night’s effort that was, of course, an entire year in the making.

Branford, my hat is off to you. None of this would have happened without your generous offer, at the height of our financial distress one year ago, to play a benefit concert to help raise some money for our orchestra. It turned into so much more than that and something for which we will be forever grateful. You played beautifully all night long and gave everyone there something we’ll remember for a long time to come. On behalf of all of us, thank you.