We had the inevitable rough rehearsal on Monday night.
The symphony is the bulk of the concert (36 minutes of music over a combined 15 for the other two pieces), so it’s been getting the bulk of the rehearsal. We started with the third movement, which we hadn’t played since our first rehearsal last month. It went well in August, and it went well on Monday: it isn’t going to require the same amount of work. Next, the second movement, which is also coming together nicely. I’m still looking forward to hear the ending with all the low brass–I auditioned a new player last week for the third trombone part, and I think she’s going to fit in well.
Then we went back to the first movement, our biggest challenge. It really is the toughest for everyone: the fastest, the most moving notes, the most meter changes. It’s sprawling in a way that the other movements aren’t. Six years ago, at the end of drafting the second movement, I wrote about being “in a stall,” and in some ways it was going back to hear the draft of the first movement that put me there, leading to the big gap in work on the piece.
My idea was to run through the movement before moving on to other music: about an hour into a two-hour rehearsal. Since we only meet once a week, I like to play through as much of our music as possible every week, which I think helps compensate for absences and just generally keep things at the top of everyone’s mind. It’s more satisfying, too, and helps us focus on the big picture.
I don’t know if we were tired (I was), if we were depressed by the rain (our first in weeks), or feeling the absence of the right combination of players, but it wasn’t a smooth run. We had to stop in places I had thought were resolved, and sections were getting lost for lack of cues. Fingers–and the baton–just didn’t seem to go in the places they need to be when they need to be there, and the stylistic quirks of my writing were holding us back.
I still feel like there is a mismatch between my rhythmic concept in the movement and what the musicians are giving back. It’s going to take some more work on both parts.
I ended with a bleak little speech that acknowledged the difficulties and the quirkiness, but didn’t really have any positive message.
In the end, the challenge of writing music for live musicians is not only crafting a score that fulfills my vision as a composer, but also sharing that vision with the people involved and with whom I am, in the end, reliant on to bring that vision to reality.
In other words, you have to work with people.
To me, sharing the vision and bringing the music to collaborators is the reward, the payoff: it’s the execution of a campaign long-planned and carefully thought out. It’s why I write for human performers instead of electronic ones. But all the planning commits a lot of people to a lot of hard work in this case: we aren’t a professional orchestra that deals with the music for two rehearsals and two concerts over the course of a week–this is occupying us for a good chunk of our season, and even a sizable slice of that chunk, since it’s the biggest thing on the concert.
The members of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra have been, over the years, enthusiastic if sometimes skeptical collaborators. I’ve tried to build their trust and to give them what they need from the podium every time I step up to the podium. They have, in turn, consistently given their honest best effort as amateurs–lovers of the art–amidst our crazy world of work, family, illness, and every other concern.
It would be the composer’s dream, perhaps, to complete the score to a major work and then hand it off to a conductor and ensemble who put it together, mostly without your help, and deliver a polished performance to bold applause, with the composer flying in for the last rehearsal and the concert and accepting the composer’s bow from the stage. I’ve done this, and it is in many ways gratifying, but it is also in some ways hollow.
I’m reminded again of Dave Hurwitz’ recounting of Einojuhani Rautavaara saying that most of the time a composer sends their work out into the world to be performed and never hears it–even a successful work might only be heard once or twice by its composer. Or as Arthur C. Clarke wrote in Childhood’s End, our children are only ours for a short time.
I am privileged to spend this time with my work, and with my collaborators: some composers don’t get to do this, or for some reason don’t want to do this. They seem to be happy or content (or resigned) to live that composer’s dream and accept the accolades on concert day while skipping the living-in that has to happen to an extent with any new piece.
But people are hard, and sometimes the hardest person to work with is yourself. I feel that over these six years I’ve been fighting myself to an extent on this piece. From the decision to start it in the first place, to the stall, to the extended time in a holding pattern, just getting it written took far longer than it should have: I should have become a symphonist–when? in 2007? in 1996? I certainly have had the ambition that long. And now, I find myself apologizing for the work, putting it on the back burner, not claiming the space that I believe that it deserves in my life or in the discourse; not wanting to seem egotistical, despite the supreme act of selfishness it is, in the end, to program a work longer than almost anything the Civic Orchestra has done, and to insist on it, and to rely on the work and effort of so many people, and in the end to demand that an audience appear to listen to it.
A few weeks ago, I caught myself in this mode: as the first rehearsal approached, I was skipping days of score study, putting off what I knew needed to happen in the name of needing to accomplish other things. In the end, I called it what it was: self-sabotage, in the form of my old enemy, procrastination. With a long-treasured goal in sight, I was letting fear have a say. Shame was having a say. Guilt was having a say. And I was trying to convince myself that it wouldn’t work, that I should pull out another piece for the November concert. I put off telling people about it until I had to, just in case.
So, who is to blame for Monday night? September has been a stressful month at our house, and I know that I went into rehearsal tired, after a morning of meetings and grading, and an afternoon of teaching trombone lessons. I’ve been difficult and grumpy around the house; and Becky called me on it last weekend (when I spent a lot of time getting caught up on grading). Late September feels like this: the newness of the school year has rubbed off, and the things you committed to with joy in August are all showing just how much commitment they are going to require.
So now, this week, I have recommitted to the orchestra, and to this piece, and to really learning the first movement, and getting insights into what it is that this composer demands, and what the shape of the thing really is. With six weeks to go–it will all be over at 6pm on November 9!–there remains work, but it will get done, and in the end, the reward will have been received not in the result but in the time and effort spent to get there, the lives that we will have lived.
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, community, conducting, Dave Hurwitz, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Lakeland Civic Orchestra, rehearsal, self-sabotage, Symphony in G "Doxology"