In the coming weeks, various members of our artistic team – our conductors, staff, and musicians – will post about some of the music that is on our minds lately. It might be something we’re preparing to play on one of our concert programs, or it might be something we’re considering for a future concert, or it might be something completely unrelated to the orchestral world, but that we like a lot. So keep an eye on this space for thoughts on music that moves us, and thanks for reading.

Volume One

My first installment isn’t really so much about what I’m listening to now, but rather how I listen to recorded music, and why. As you might imagine, I hear loads of classical music in my job – bits of rehearsal, the actual concerts themselves, music that we’re thinking about programming, and so on. But I don’t listen to exclusively classical music at work as you might think. The truth is, I find that I work best in my office with music playing in the background, as a sort of audio wallpaper – jazz, world music, sometimes rock, but never classical.

For me, classical is foreground music, which requires your full attention and emotional investment. But I can listen to most any other genre of music while working on budget spreadsheets or typing emails. I have an iPhone that I got in September (to replace and augment my beloved iPod which died a premature death in a swimming pool last August) and I have something like 3,200 tracks loaded onto it. I’ve divided them into playlists based loosely on genre, mood, something distinctive. I give them all weird little titles – for instance, my classic rock playlist is called “Hello, Cleveland!” and my 1980s list is “Greed is Good” (…hey, I went to high school and college during the ‘80s, I’m allowed…). I’ll put one of them on in shuffle mode when I start my workday, and turn it on and off as I go to meetings or make phone calls.

So in the past few weeks I’ve heard the following: the electronically shaded vocals of Imogen Heap’s mesmerizing “Hide and Seek,” Art Tatum’s blazing piano technique from his Complete Pablo Sessions box set, pianist Christopher O’Riley’s transcriptions of Radiohead songs, and various cuts from the soundtrack to the film Across the Universe. Beatles purists will no doubt roll their eyes at that last one, but I think most of them are an interesting and valid re-boot of those time-honored songs. I think comic actor Eddie Izzard’s take on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is particularly strange and fresh.

Back to classical, though, I also refreshed my memory of Manuel de Falla’s Siete canciones populares españolas and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, which we performed with soprano Anne Harley at our Pops concerts a couple of weeks ago. I did a radio interview on WUNC’s The State of Things about the concerts which also featured Mariachi Cobre, and I wanted to have a vivid description of the music that Anne was going to sing.

So, there you have it. At least now my co-workers will have an explanation of why they might walk by my office and hear the sounds of Wilco or Dave Brubeck coming out the door instead of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.