How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Creativity and courage.

Here’s a tried and true formula for orchestral programs (I mean in the concert hall, not necessarily on the radio, though I’ve assembled such hours of music many times). Before intermission, play a short curtain-raiser, then launch into a substantial work. Often the second work features a guest soloist. It may also be something challenging, such as a modern work, or one that’s not too well known. After intermission, play one or two orchestral works. Generally at least one will be a piece from the standard repertoire (something the listener is likely to recognize and / or something accessible).

Though I’m a radio music director, not an orchestral one, I can see good practical reasons for adhering to this outline. The short opener allows for a reasonable break for seating latecomers. Most listeners will sit through even a fairly bracing contemporary work in the second slot, if they can see the promise of a favorite after intermission; putting it on the second half might nudge a few out the door during intermission.

So, it works. But Thomas Morris thinks we can do better.

If the name sounds familiar, it should: Morris was The Cleveland Orchestra’s executive director from 1987 to 2004.

Morris is part of a team putting together the Festival of North American Orchestras. About three years from now (May 2011), New York’s Carnegie Hall will present a 9-day series of concerts by orchestras of all sizes, including regional ensembles. The judges will choose the participating orchestras on only one criterion: programming creativity. The festival will cover the production costs.

The intent isn’t necessarily to promote contemporary music, though the festival’s team won’t resist it by any means. Rather, the idea is to reward innovative, surprising, and ear-opening combinations of works.

Not only may the experience lead the nine winners toward more courageous programming on their own home turf, the process of competing for the prize is likely to encourage many more to reconsider their programming policies. This could produce some interesting results.

Read more:

Adventures in Concert Programming in the New York Times (registration may be required)

From the Middle Ages, Italy’s Medici family was a magnet for artists and artisans, who created extraordinary works under the family’s generous patronage. In 1688, Florence’s Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici hired Barolomeo Cristofori, then 33 years old, to look after his collection of harpsichords. This was an important position: Cristofori was paid as much as any court musician.

The harpsichord of Cristofori’s time was a well developed instrument, responsive and flexible. But it lacked one feature: variable dynamics. The harpsichord’s mechanism plucked the strings of the instrument. There was no practical way (then) to make it pluck them more gently. The only way to vary volume was to change stops or combine manuals. The possibilities for dynamic variety were fairly limited.

Some time in the 1690s, Cristofori had a brainstorm. He realized that if he replaced the harpsichord’s plucking mechanism with one which struck the string instead, the force of the strike — and thus the volume of the sound — could be under complete control of the player.

The idea of a keyboard instrument that struck the strings rather than plucking them wasn’t really new. The clavichord had existed since at least the 15th century. A clavichord had tangents fastened to the keys. Instead of controlling jacks and quills which plucked the strings, the tangents themselves struck the strings inside the instrument’s case.

The problem with the clavichord was that while it was capable of extraordinary sensitive dynamic expression, its volume range was from almost inaudible to barely audible. Let’s face it, the force that a keyboard player can transmit through his or her fingers is limited. The clavichord’s tangents couldn’t strike its strings with enough force to make a sound that could be heard, say, in a church sanctuary. This meant that the clavichord wasn’t suitable for anything other than the most intimate music-making. (It made a magnificent instrument for late-night keyboard practice, however.)

Cristofori solved this problem by adding a mechanical action. It multiplied the player’s string-striking force by four (eight, in his later instruments) and used that force to drive a hammer onto the string. He also added an escapement mechanism. The escapement allowed the hammer to fall back after striking the string, so the string would keep vibrating. (Think of the way a fine crystal goblet rings when you tap it with a spoon — as long as you don’t keep the spoon touching the glass after you tap it.)

Cristofori called his invention “arpicimbalo che fa il piano e il forte” — harpsichord with soft and loud. Today, we shorten that name a bit. We call it the piano.

Maybe you’re expecting me to say here that Cristofori’s piano “took Europe by storm” (or some similar cliche’!) and almost immediately eclipsed the harpsichord.

That didn’t happen. Truth to tell, keyboard players didn’t like the touch. The Florentine piano was harder to play, and the keys just didn’t feel right when pressed. They didn’t like the tone, either; it was too soft, too muffled. Besides, who really needed that much variety in volume anyway?

It would remain for later piano makers to solve these problems. But Cristofori had begun the process of breaking the harpsichord’s lock on public keyboard performance. It’s not hard to imagine that without the financial and moral support of the Medici family, Cristofori probably couldn’t have pushed keyboard technology ahead — but that’s another story for another day.

Now back to 1700, and over to Naples. That’s when and where Domenico Scarlatti, one more musical member of a hugely talented musical family, was named organist and composer of the Royal Chapel. He was even granted a special additional salary for his work as chamber harpsichordist.

Domenico Scarlatti was only 15 years old.

Two years later, Scarlatti and his father Alessandro made the first of two visits to Florence. Their host was none other than Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, Cristofori’s patron. Did Domenico play one or more of Cristofori’s Florentine pianos on these visits? Perhaps. History doesn’t tell us. So far no documentation has surfaced — no letters home raving about (or excoriating!) the new-fangled instrument, no eyewitness reports, no newspaper articles.

By 1708, Domenico had joined his father in Rome. There he attended the weekly concerts originated by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. In 1709, Prince Ferdinando sent the Cardinal a lavish gift from Florence: one of Cristofori’s pianos. Did Scarlatti play or hear that instrument? Again, history doesn’t tell us.

In 1719, Scarlatti left Rome, ostensibly for England. In actuality, he was on his way to Lisbon, Portugal, where he had a job offer — he was to be master of the Royal Chapel there. In Lisbon he encountered an exceptionally talented royal youngster — the infanta Maria Barbara, who, as a contemporary report said, “Surprise[ed] the amazed intelligence of the most excellent Professors with her Mastery of Singing, Playing and Composition.”

In January of 1729, Maria Barbara married Ferdinando, the Spanish infante. It was a rather uncomfortable union whose purpose was entirely political. Maria Barbara soon found herself in the hostile company of the jealous Queen Isabella of Spain. Isabella even refused to allow Maria Barbara to bring along her personal servants — all but one, that is: her music teacher, Domenico Scarlatti. During the remaining 28 years of his life, Scarlatti composed and cataloged over 550 keyboard exercises for Maria Barbara — from 1746, queen of Spain.

There are several more points at which Scarlatti and the Florentine piano are linked (if only circumstantially), but what’s undeniable is that Maria Barbara herself was a point of intersection.

Maria Barbara owned pianos. We know this because she died just over a year after Scarlatti did, and at her death, her instruments were inventoried. Of her dozen (!) keyboard instruments, three were pianos, and two more were harpsichords which had been converted from pianos (perhaps because their actions failed, or because they were judged unsatisfactory as pianos). It thus becomes rather difficult to deny that Scarlatti was acquainted with the piano.

But did he play them? Did he intend for Maria Barbara to play his sonatas on them?

Ralph Kirkpatrick didn’t think so. Kirkpatrick was an American harpsichordist (1911 - 1984). He had a distinguised career as a performer, but his magnum opus was his biography of Domenico Scarlatti. It occupied him for 16 years, from 1937 to 1953. When it came to Scarlatti’s sonatas, Kirkpatrick’s views in that 1953 publication were enormously influential, guiding the performance practice of a generation of historically-oriented keyboard musicians.

Kirkpatrick pointed out that 73 of Scarlatti’s 550-some sonatas required more keys than the queen’s pianos had. This is pretty hard to argue with! It seems very unlikely that either Maria Barbara or Scarlatti played those 73 sonatas on any of the pianos to which they had known access. That’s a carefully qualified statement, but it’s about as definitive as we can really get in this discussion.

Kirkpatrick thought that was sufficient evidence to declare that Scarlatti probably had the harpsichord in mind for playing all of his sonatas. There is more to his argument, but it’s mostly conjectural, related to what he saw as the musical suitability of the piano of the time to the sonatas. What else can one do without definitive surviving documentation?

But from 1970, other historically-oriented musicologists and performers began to question Kirkpatrick’s assessment. Their re-evaluation of the evidence, sketchy as it was and is, led to harpsichord maker David Sutherland’s 1995 article in Early Music magazine, “Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano.”

Sutherland argued that, in making his recommendation, Kirkpatrick should have given more weight to the circumstantial evidence connecting Scarlatti and the early Florentine piano. Sutherland also questioned Kirkpatrick’s judgement of the Florentine piano as unsuited to Scarlatti’s sonatas, but in all honesty it’s difficult to see Sutherland’s view of this matter as any less subjective than Kirkpatrick’s. Finally, he took issue with Kirkpatrick’s argument that the piano was mostly used at court for accompanying singers. Sutherland’s evidence here seems about as persuasive as Kirkpatrick’s. Stalemate.

Who’s right? I don’t know.

Keyboard isn’t my instrument, so maybe I’m able to view this whole discussion with a bit of detachment. We’ve invested over 70 years in poring over what little documentation exists (reckoning from when Kirkpatrick began his research for Domenico Scarlatti). We have more informed opinions than ever (and thank goodness for that), but informed as they are, they’re still opinions. We don’t have a definitive answer as to whether Scarlatti intended his sonatas for the harpsichord or the piano. Perhaps he intended some of them for one and some for the other, but we have no way of knowing that. If he did, the 73 I mentioned before are the only ones which we currently have much hope of assigning. Actually, we don’t know whether Scarlatti even cared which instrument they were played on. We may never know. There just isn’t enough evidence to say.

Meanwhile, players of the modern piano, from Dame Myra Hess to Vladimir Horowitz — and countless others since — have never stopped playing Scarlatti. Why should they? For them, I suspect that the question of what instrument Scarlatti had played was pretty much academic. His music worked for them on their chosen instrument. They gave Scarlatti a voice, and also found their own expressive nuances in the sonatas. Audiences loved it. I imagine that was enough for them.

What I do know is that I’ve heard successful and musically enlightening performances of Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichords, Florentine pianos, and modern pianos. But don’t take my word for it; compare for yourself. Here are three short clips from Scarlatti’s Sonata in f minor, K519 — played on modern piano, a reproduction of Cristofori’s Florentine piano, and harpsichord.

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on modern piano (Beatrice Long)

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on Florentine piano (David Schrader)

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on harpsichord (Colin Tilney)

I’ve also heard some pretty good Scarlatti on other instruments, including harp and guitar. His music seems to suit many different instruments, and I for one am glad that one more avenue of timbre and style has opened up for interpreting Scarlatti sonatas.

Further reading:

Domenico Scarlatti. Ralph Kirkpatrick, 1953 (1983 revision).

Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano. David Sutherland, Early Music, 1995 (Note: JSTOR access is required to read this article. A public-access computer associated with a university or library will usually connect immediately, but most home or business computers will not.)

A Florentine Piano c.1730 for Early Piano Music. Denzil Wraight.

Domenico Scarlatti, a brief biography. Chris Whent, Here of a Sunday Morning, WBAI, New York.

Cristofori, Inventor of the Piano. Roy E. Howard, Cantos Para Todos.

You may have read that Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier was written for a keyboard instrument in equal temperament. Well, not exactly. This Introduction to Historical Tunings explains what temperament is, how to categorize Bach’s WTC, and what Bach was trying to say musically.

It’s not every day that you find a classical composer whose parents didn’t ask, “How’s the fugue coming along, Timmy” when he was 5.

At 5, Dan Visconti was playing violin, but two months later he quit. It wasn’t until he turned 18 that he started really listening to classical music.

A few years later he was composing it, but mixing in a lot of rock, jazz and blues. WKSU’s Vivian Goodman chatted with the Cleveland Arts Prize winner in a practice room at the Cleveland Institute of Music:

Robert Schuman’s Violin Concerto in d does not have an Opus number…it has instead ‘WoO 23′. That simply means ‘Without Opus’. The reason it did get assigned one was that, frankly, the people who knew him best and saw his behavior at the time he was composing it were afraid the public might somehow discover a side that they did not want. They though that his deteriorating mental health went through the sound of the piece. And so, it was kept hidden for more than 80 years.

Schumann started on it on September 11, 1853 and was finished with it in 22 days. The whole thing was on paper in just three weeks. But I should add an asterisk there because of what happened before he was totally finished. A young man named Johannes Brahms showed up on October 1st. Schumann had barely started the 3rd movement. There was something about that first meeting (that has been mentioned many times as one of the most important in Classical Music history). After that first night, though Robert Schumann composed this violin concerto for his old friend, Joseph Joachim, there was something about his new friend that motivated him to compose virtually the entire third movement in just three days!

The concert in which it was to premiere was later that month. Joachim did play the Schumann Fantasie in C major, Op. 131, but he did no play the concerto, and never would. But he held onto the manuscript the rest of his life. Schumann tried to kill himself 5 months later and ended up in a sanatorium. What happened only added to Joachim’s suspicions that a very different man had composed the piece than the one he knew. So, he began a quiet campaign to make sure the piece would stay unperformed. He went to Schumann’s widow Clara, and even to his new friend Brahms to get them to agree that the piece would stay out of the public’s hands, hopefully forever. Interesting though, if Joachim felt so strongly that way, why didn’t he destroy it? It his will, he stipulated that it would not be destroyed and end up in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, it would not be performed for anther hundred years after the composer’s death…which would have made it 1956.

But, in March 1933, during a spiritualist séance in London with two of Joachim’s grandnieces, at least one claimed to have heard the spirit-voice of Robert Schumann requesting that they pull out the script and perform it. It took a while to find it and then four years later, it just so happened that Yehudi Menuhin was given the music as was asked for his opinion of it. Menuhin dropped everything he was doing and began to get ready for the premiere.

However, one of the grand nieces of Joachim, who had a reputation as a decent violinist claimed that the ‘spiritualist’ told her she should be the one to premiere it. And then the German government (i.e. The Nazi’s) got involved and said that it had to be a German to perform it. So, on November 26, 1937, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a relatively unknown (German) violinist, it was premiered. But about a week later, it was Menuhin who gave the second performance (with a in the piano version), but it was at Carnegie Hall. The niece gave it the third performance.

I’m leading somewhere with all of this. Okay, Robert Schuman was definitely not doing well mentally by the time he composed his violin concerto. He had always been haunted by the fact that his mother had lost her sanity and committed suicide. And now that he had had to fight the onset of syphilis, he knew that often the greatest devastation from it was insanity. So, as so many people did in those days, for it he took mercury. It causes insanity.

We must remember that in those days, people wanted to hide anyone with mental illness…almost to the point of making it look as though mental illness did not exist. So was Joseph Joachim correct in convincing Clara Schumann that her husband’s illness showed up too much in this piece?

There is no doubt that the beginning opens with an intensity rarely heard, and if we were aware of what was going on in his mind, then we could understand a bit more what he was trying to say. But why should we blow off a potential masterpiece just because were too afraid of ‘going inside’ the piece, to let it take you away. We won’t get insanity by listening to it. Actually, because of the intensity in which he composed it, we might be allowed to experience more the art of it (the music as pure art). Schumann, more than just about anyone in his trade, looked at music as art, long before he was a composer of it, he was serious observer of it (including being a well-respected critic and publisher of a highly touted music magazine. Okay, should we not look at a later Van Gogh because we might see insanity?

Was Joachim right? Or should the man, Schumann, be known for everything he was?

Now that the Cultural Revolution is history and classical music is no longer banned as cultural pollution, it seems to be growing apace in China. Recently I noted here that China is home to the world’s largest piano manufacturer — and that it sells most of its instruments in its own nation. American conductor Lorin Maazel is one of many Western musicians who have suggested that Chinese audiences may give a real boost to classical music.

Meanwhile, US writers continue to fret over the greying of classical music audiences in our own land, despite the fact that their predictions of classical music’s imminent death never seem to quite pan out.

Some of these writers mutter darkly that if they were wrong about classical music being moribund, it’s only because it’s in the process of moving half way round the world. They point to the estimates of 100 million Chinese conservatory students and note that, worldwide, orchestras are performing more works of Chinese composers and engaging more Chinese-born soloists.

If you are not free yourself, how can you interpret music freely?        – A Chinese music critic

In the 7 July issue of The New Yorker, Alex Ross takes a closer look at the Chinese classical music juggernaut and concludes that all is not quite what it appears to be.

(As an aside, violist Wing Ho, mentioned in the New Yorker article, studied in Northeast Ohio, at the Kent State School of Music and Oberlin Conservatory.)

Further reading:

Symphony of Millions: Taking stock of the Chinese music boom in The New Yorker

A Nation of Pianos and Pianists in WKSU Classical

American pianist Leonard Pennario has died, just two weeks short of his 84th birthday.

Pennario, born in Buffalo 9 July 1924, made his public debut at the age of 12, playing the Grieg concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He is remembered for his chamber music collaborations with violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. In the 1970s, Pennario expanded his audience appeal with more popular works by such composers as Gershwin and Gottschalk.

Pennario’s biographer, Mary Kunz Goldman, remembers Pennario’s enthusiasm for music lovers. Perhaps Pennario was thinking of Glenn Gould when he said, "You have to play for the people; you have to play for an audience. You can’t just go into the studio and make records, you know?"

Goldman says that Pennario died Friday (27 June 2008) at his home in San Diego of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Musical instruments that play themselves are far from new. The barrel organ dates back to the 9th century; a 16th century example is still in use today. Mozart and Haydn composed music especially for the Viennese flute-clock, a mechanized organ favored from about 1720. The music box is a relative latecomer; it dates from the very last years of the 18th century.

What is unusual, though, is machinery that plays an existing instrument. One of the rare examples is the Vorsetzer, developed in the early 20th century. It was a piano player, rather than a player piano. It recorded not the sound of the piano, but rather the movements of the keys and pedals when a virtuoso played the instrument. The reproducing apparatus (the Vorsetzer; literally, "sitter-before") was rolled up to a piano, and it reproduced the actions of the pianist. Assuming a playback piano more or less equivalent to the recording instrument, the result was a performance that (in theory at least) sounded as if the virtuoso were playing for you in your own living room.

While one could certainly argue whether any machine can adequately reproduce the touch of a human pianist, a wind or string instrument is yet another matter.

You might say that musician and instrument are closely coupled. The wind player’s body is literally part of the instrument, the mouth and windpipe acting as a resonating cavity. The shape of the mouth and lips interacts with a flute’s lip plate or embouchure hole, a trumpet’s mouthpiece, or the reed of a clarinet, oboe, or bassoon. In a way, playing a wind instrument has a lot in common with singing — it involves the entire performer, body and mind.

Here we have a machine that holds and plays a clarinet.

But it does not sing.

Understand, I’m not dismissing this accomplishment. Any student who has struggled with a clarinet embouchure will tell you that machinery able to coax a more or less stable tone from a clarinet, be it carbon-based or silicon-based, is a long way from trivial. Even with modern computer control, the device demonstrated below is no mean feat.

Remarkable as it may be, it has a long way to go before the results can be called musical. Over 100 years later, this gadget doesn’t approach the Vorsetzer’s ability to preserve the performer’s interpretive skill and musicanship — at least not yet. Although my left brain is impressed with the technology, my right brain thinks it would rather hear a beginning student play Go Tell Aunt Rhody.

Aaron Copland never called Rodeo ‘Ro-DAY-oh’, as nearly all Classical announcers do (including Yours Truly). He simply called it ‘ROH-dee-oh’, just like the people who go to them. None of this nose-in-the-air as you go strutting down the famous shopping drive in L.A., but plain folks enjoying some distinctly Western-American Cowboy culture.

Why is it that sometimes when Classical music announcers and even aficionados grab hold of something that is down-to-earth like Rodeo from Aaron Copland, do they have to try to raise it from the rest of society, as though now only certain people are allowed to enjoy it? Hmmm.