Three strings, yer out!

In honor of the Red Sox 2007 home opener (like I need an excuse to write about that) and because this blog has become a regular balm for me, Soho the Dog has posed the inevitable question:

What if orchestras were run more like baseball teams?

On press today...

Spending the day in lovely Canton, Mass. looking at proofs of our 2007-2008 season brochure. Quite a season we have lined up, I must say. But no, I won't reveal the artists coming. You can find out April 21 at Standing O! when all will be revealed...

Bobby McFerrin on Voicestra

Bobby McFerrin

Here is vocal wizard Bobby McFerrin's description of the 12-piece improvisational vocal ensemble, Voicestra, joining him for his April 14 appearance at Symphony Hall. We're publishing it in the concert program along with the bios of all the singers in the group.

Bobby McFerrin:

My favorite, most inspiring times in concert have always been the impromptu moments on stage when the audience participates. At some point, I began to realize that I wanted to work with other singers, and the idea for Voicestra seemed to develop from these spontaneous group efforts in my performances.

Voicestra is a 12-piece ensemble, and the music we sing encompasses all kinds of materials: world music, African chants, Indian ragas, storytelling, new songs based on the alphabet, and contemporary vocal compositions.  We released the album "Circlesongs" in 1997 on Sony Classical and it remains one of my favorite recordings.

Circlesongs are all improvisational. It comes from the notion that villages in Africa could get together and the Shaman would come up with something to celebrate and he would give out parts for them to sing.  This was affirmed a little bit by a woman from Africa who I met in Vienna one year, who was traveling with a group who had come directly from a village in Africa. She didn’t speak a word of English but she did speak French. Voicestra had just done this concert and backstage, when we came out, she started speaking to me in French. We had someone interpreting and she said ‘This is just like home. This is exactly what we would do in my village. The chief would give us a part to sing and this would be the song.'

My belief is that this is the most accessible way of people getting together who don’t know each other. It’s a primal singing without words that seems to be genetically transmitted to my bones and that goes directly to my spirit. One of the simplest forms of prayer and meditation is through chanting, and singing in community is extremely powerful. Gathering people in a space and making them sing instantly puts down all barriers and destroys all differences in creed, gender, and race.

So this is what Voicestra still does now. We came from doing a heavily produced show to just a community of singers, twelve of us. And me standing in the middle. And I start to sing and I find something and I give out the part to an individual singer for then to sing, to riff on, to chant, and then it changes; it can change, it can shift, it can last one minute to one hundred and one minutes. You understand why tribes in Africa, when they celebrate and dance, can go for hours and hours: the power of the drum, the beat, how it goes on and on, like your heartbeat. It’s relentless. It keeps shifting and going and it’s essential; and it’s all improvised, every last bit of it.

Bobby McFerrin Symphony Hall performance page

Dissing Liszt

It seems like this week is all gray skies, Schilling's Opening Day, and tax season. Well, when I need something to pick me up I turn to Nicolas Slonimsky's delightful Lexicon of Musical Invective, Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time and give myself a dose of the ridiculous. Today, the book fell open to Franz Liszt. Here's a double-barreled blast of a quote aimed at the famed pianist, composer and lady's man. It's virtually guaranteed to raise a smile:

"The worst of all, and positively devilish, was the Mephisto Waltz. . . .Such music is simply diabolical, and shuts out every ray of light or heaven from whence music sprang."
          - from Dwight's Journal of Music, Boston, Mass., November 5, 1870

Want more? Here you go:

"Liszt's orchestral music is an insult to art. It is gaudy musical harlotry, savage and incoherent bellowings."
            - from Boston Gazette, quoted in Dexter Smith's Paper, April 1872

Nice, eh? And both from Boston, no less.

There should be a band called Gaudy Musical Harlotry. OK, maybe not, but it should at least be a section in your local record store (well, back when there were record stores).

Globe reviews DBR & THE MISSION

Matthew Guerreri's review of DBR & THE MISSION is in today's Globe. Enjoy this bit:

"The best revealed unexpected affinities. A bass line borrowed from Rachmaninoff's famous C-sharp minor Prelude established a menacing mood that soon flowered into a sunny Steely Dan jazz-rock epiphany. A couple of heavy-metal-flavored movements thrashed well, with violent bowing that recalled Bartók and Shostakovich."

Read all of He takes a stand between classic and pop.

DBR at Hibernian Hall

Violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain spent several days in Boston prior to his Saturday night concert at Berklee Performance Center. One of his stops was Hibernian Hall in Roxbury, where he gave a lecture/demonstration at the Roxbury Center for the Arts. Here are a few shots from that evening:

DBR firsts

 
DBR & THE MISSION

Saturday evening's performance by DBR & THE MISSION yielded many new things, including a most welcome surprise in the addition to the program of the world premiere of Want, by MISSION keyboardist Wynne Bennet.

Among the other firsts on the program was the first incidence of heavy metal style headbanging (three violinists in unison, hair flying) at a Celebrity Series performance that I know of (though perhaps longtime subscribers can remember some rather strange heavy metal evening with, say, Jaime Laredo, of which I'm unaware). I also can't recall ever having heard a wah-wah pedal used either at a Celebrity Series performance or by a violinist (though I wouldn't put it past Nigel Kennedy), or heard any reference, much less an extensive one, to Jimi Hendrix's famous Woodstock rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner (cellist Matt Haimovitz has played the solo, but not on our stage).

All in all, a remarkable and unusual evening. The Boston Globe attended, I'll post the review when it shows up online (if it shows up online, I never could find that Cirque Eloize review...).