I don’t know if anyone ever reads the program notes I write for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra or for my own music. I assume that audience members get bored and eventually turn to them, but I think I am the rare person who eagerly jumps to the notes before the concert or during intermission. However, I’ve come to a couple of ideas to make them better and more interesting.
I love the big-time orchestra practice of listing the instrumentation for large pieces in a conspicuous place–the Cleveland Orchestra puts it in a sidebar with the other vital statistics for the piece, including the Orchestra’s own history with it, which I find fascinating. How long did it take a world-class orchestra to get around to programming pieces that would become standard repertoire? At any rate, my practice for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra has been to put this information in a short, introductory paragraph, which I then follow by a less-formal, more explanatory paragraph or two, depending on the complexity and history of the piece. I have come to consider writing the program notes a crucial part of my own preparation, as I summarize my conception and understanding of the piece.
What to explain, though, and how to say it?
I’m always amazed at concerts of new music to read notes that are blow-by-blow musical descriptions of a piece. “The first theme, a haunting sea chanty for nose flute, lasts seven bars and is in alternating duple and triple meter.” I can’t abide this, and I cringe when I see it. How could one possibly sit in a concert with the express intent of counting measures? In this age, if one is truly interested in such things, it is usually quite easy to inquire about the score. Tell something about the piece–how it came to be, what it’s about, what it’s not about, how it makes someone feel, why it exists. If the foremost achievement of your work is how it is put together, it isn’t much of a piece (unless you are Bach, in which case, your mastery is likely self-evident, and there is no need to write about your pieces form in the program note). One of the rare big-time orchestra program notes I read in this fashion, a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra note on Ravel’s Bolero from the mid-1990s, did, in fact, include a section-by-section accounting of which instruments played the melody. Useful as a reference, perhaps, but are we then expected to sit, pencils in hand, and check off the solos as they appear? It’s not as though there are likely to be surprise substitutions. While I admit to a certain satisfaction of filling in the scorecard at a baseball game, where following the details minutely can focus one’s attention on the event at hand in a situation in which there are many distractions (most of them edible or potable), attending a concert isn’t the same thing. Or, perhaps there are audience members who would like a scorecard of sorts. Witness the Baltimore Symphony’s experimentation with live-tweeting of concerts, although I think this more a testament to our addiction to our mobile communications technology than an indication of some latent demand for on-the-fly musical analysis.
My other beef is bad writing in program notes, particularly passive voice. Authors of the type of note described above are particularly vulnerable to passive voice, creating zombie sentence after zombie sentence (if you can put the words by zombies after the verb, a sentence is in passive voice), but they are not unique in their infection with this plague. Again, when composers are permitted to write their own notes, quality often goes down, a thing which I find inexplicable, as I can’t imagine a composer who is not also a voracious reader and thus, hopefully, a passable writer. At the very least, we should have the capacity to self-edit and revise until something is good.
I see no reason why a program note ought not to begin with the title of the composition as the subject of the first sentence (not as a title with a colon following it, mind you, but as an integral part of the paragraph). It should be in boldface and, if not a generic title, in italics. In 2015, these are not optional. Give us something to make us want to hear the music–a good story, the inspiration for the title, the importance of this piece to your oeuvre, or how much you enjoyed collaborating with the person you wrote it for. Give the reader a sense of what it was like to compose the piece, or what it will be like to hear it. The most common question I get from audience members is “how did you think of it?” This is a hard question to answer, but they want to know. Even if it is complete fabrication, because your piece is perfectly absolute with no clear inspiration, you must listen to it afresh, with the ears of an audience member, and attempt to come up with something that will help explain why you did what you did.
Remember, too, that a good note isn’t simply spewed onto the page–do not wait until you are working on conference or festival submissions to write the note. I don’t consider a piece finished until I’ve completed my short, written justification of it, so make note-writing a part of the compositional process. I am focusing on being more reflective about my life lately, and it occurs to me that writing the program note is a fantastic post-compositional way to reflect on the act of composing, and on the project just completed.
My thoughts.