"Hello! My name is Jonah, and I'm a violist…”
Since this is my first "Travelogue" for the American Viola Society, and since you are already taking time to read this, I think you deserve to know a bit more about me. Last month Matthew Dane (editor for the JAVS) interviewed me about my background, and about my work in the Chiara String Quartet. But now that it's just you and me, I can share with you more about my day-to-day life--the real (and unscripted) version what it is like to be in a touring ensemble. Balancing life in a quartet with personal life, teaching, and solo performing is a bigger trick than some might imagine. And yet I feel incredibly lucky to do the work that I do. Over the next months, I want to share with you some of the most interesting moments in my performing and traveling. But I also want to share some of those other moments that maybe don't seem so "important" on the surface but really make up a life in music. Or just a life, period.
Where to start?
The last two months have been busy for my quartet. As I was living through them, and starting to think about this log, I found myself amazed at how many different kinds of work I was doing from one day to the next. I want to tell you about three events, each of which was energizing and creatively gratifying. Recently, I've been spending a lot of my time thinking about how concert music is changing, and each of these speaks to that change in a different way.
Careers Forum
I'll start at the Careers Forum hosted by the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in early October. My quartet felt honored to be invited as guest speakers (and performers) at this 3-day workshop. The whole idea was to bring together 3-4 students, as well as one or two faculty or administrative staff, from each of the top 15 conservatories in the country, and just start talking about music careers and how they are (and should be) changing. Eric Booth (the arts-in-education guru, and a major influence on our group) was the facilitator for the weekend, and eighth blackbird (the awesome new music ensemble) also presented. But really, the focus was on the students. They came with myriad strengths, and each brought a performance they were ready to give. To get some of the conversation going, we performed for them, showing them how we play when performing in bars and clubs (something we've been doing quite a bit). We created a set in which movements from very different pieces were purposefully juxtaposed. We welcomed applause between the movements, and we didn't bow between pieces, but just talked with the audience from our seats while tuning, as if we were acoustic singer/songwriters…
The next night eighth blackbird performed a mini-concert that showed off their unique approach. Like us, they dressed casually (but well!). They also memorized quite a bit of their rep, and actually choreographed their motion around the stage during the performance to highlight important relationships between the parts. Meanwhile, the students had been working in randomly-assigned groups of five. They came together and developed a way to present their individually-prepared pieces as a group. They created themes, worked on transitions and extra-musical content (like poems, lighting, and choreography), and basically used what they had seen and heard from us and eighth blackbird as a starting point for some very innovative ways of approaching performance.
Photo byJonah Sirota
Students at Shepherd School of Music's Career Forum--including the Jasper String Quartet--preparing for a multimedia performance
At the end of the weekend, they performed their shows, and we were blown away by the creativity and thoughtfulness of their work, not to mention their great gifts as musicians. While all of this was going on, I had some great conversations with students about how conservatories could change to better equip them for the work they will be doing as musicians. There was a strong feeling that the classical music world is way too sheltered from the rest of society, that we have spent so much time protecting our traditions, that we lose the chance to convince newcomers of what makes the music great to begin with. The students know the relevance of their work. But they also know that a new generation of audience-member needs different ways in. The weekend gave us so much to think about, and seemed to have almost historical significance, with all of these different schools represented. We left feeling inspired by the students' amazing work and idealism. We were also so happy to see music school faculty and staff truly excited about the possibilities for really engaging and changing the conservatory training model.
Recording Session
After that weekend, we stuck around in Houston to do a three-day recording session on Jefferson Friedman's 2nd and 3rd String Quartets. Recording is a different art entirely from live performance, as anyone who has spent time doing it knows. Judy Sherman, the classical producer, was our captain during these sessions. She likes to say that recording is all about making different mistakes each take. It's absolutely true.
Photo byJonah Sirota
Producer Judy Shermen gives a star to my quartet colleague Rebecca Fischer (for successfully finishing the session!) while composer Jefferson Friedman looks on
We spent a good deal of time laying down the performances that would serve as the base for our recording. These are the run-throughs that feel the most like a concert performance. But after that, it's about fixing one thing at a time, and as much as you want to focus on everything (like in a performance), sometimes it's just that one chord, that one phrase, or that one pitch. It's a pretty weird, unnatural feeling. But the result, in the hands of someone like Judy, is a very real picture of the piece, and of our perspective on it from one moment in time. It is very exciting, in that it is like a live performance that emerges over a day or two. Judy's absolutely the best. A colleague recently said about her that "she can hear the grass grow," and that's totally true! I felt like I could trust her ears, and that is so rare for a string quartet musician to feel. We are used to being the most anal, neurotic listeners in a room...
Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences
The last example from my eclectic month was the Chiara Quartet's recent trip to Seattle. We did two very different concerts there: one was at the U. of Washington's Meany Hall, where we performed a program called "Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences." We developed this program last season, as a way to bring together music written by composers who were working at the edges of two or more cultural identities. We were inspired to curate this program after thinking about a piece that our good friend Gabriela Lena Frank wrote for us in 2001. Called Leyendas:An Andean Walkabout for String Quartet, it's a highly original work inspired by her travels to remote villages in the Andes mountains. She heard incredible folk music there (in her ancestral home), and following in the footsteps of Bartok and Ginestera, wrote a serious classical work out of these unusual materials. The title of our program comes from her own description of how she defined this new musical mixed ("mestizo") language. She was particularly inspired by how the Peruvian author Arguedas used the idea: as a new kind of art where two cultural influences can blend without subjugating each other.
It got us thinking, and in the end we had a program with Frank's 6-movement work split up into three chunks. Works by Bartok, Zhou Long, and Osvaldo Golijov fit in among them, to create a dramatic arch leading from light into darkness and back out again. So at Meany Hall, we used lighting, and blackouts between the pieces, to create a sense that this was a musical "play." We bowed only at the end of each "act," and played this very thorny program without apology. The audience loved it. I always get nervous about playing a program that has no Beethoven, or other standard fare. I am wrong to feel this way- people want to hear a story, and care most about whether a program has meaning.
Photo by Lee Talner
Here we are performing Mestizaje on the stage of Meany Hall for the U. of Washington's World Series
It’s been a good couple of months. But I have a new journey to embark on. By the time I share my next log with you, I will be a new dad! Believe me, preparing the end of the second movement of Bartok's 2nd Quartet is a piece of cake compared with preparing to have a new family. At least practicing the Bartok, I can have some idea of what comes next… |
