Background/Foreground follow-up

While waiting to find a neurologist who will answer my questions about the brain’s ability to handle two or more aural stimuli at the same time, I will report some personal experiences on the subject.

I would be glad to hear from any of you who have had similar experiences dealing with two or more stimuli of any kind.

In practicing a Bach prelude, in which each hand plays a separate and independent line, I can hear the right hand without effort, but even with intense focus on the left hand part, there are times when I cannot hear it, and therefore make many mistakes.

In playing the slow movement of a Mozart sonata, I cannot hear the repeated rhythmic sixteenth notes that accompany the melody of the right hand – I only hear the right-hand melody, and must look at the left to insure I am playing what is written.

In reading aloud a book about dogs, I read accurately – even dramatically - while thinking clearly about something entirely different – plans for dinner,  appointments for the next day, a movie I have recently seen.

BACKGROUND/FOREGROUND

Ivan Krajbich, a renowned pediatric surgeon in Seattle, specializes in operations requiring seven or eight hours of laser-like concentration on tiny organs and thread-like nerves. During these exacting procedures, Dr. Krajbich insists that loud rock music be played in the operating room. The rest of the team finds the level painfully disturbing, but he claims he absolutely needs the music blasting away to keep him focused on his work. Unfortunately, the operating staff cannot block out those painful sounds, pounding in the background. Humans can close their eyes; they cannot close their ears.

We don’t listen to background sounds, though we do hear them. Listening requires attention, and background sounds require no attention. But we are aware of them. Our brain registers their presence. Unfortunately, the music in the operating room was so persistently annoying that the team was forced to pay attention to it. At that moment it ceased to be background music, and must surely have distracted them from their duties. Perhaps the Hippocratic oath could be expanded to include “do no harm” to staff as well as to patients.

Are all the sounds in the environment processed simultaneously in different locations of the brain, or does the brain shift attention in a nanosecond from one source to another, creating the impression that it receives more than one sound at the same time? That is the subject for the next, more technical blog. Whatever the differing opinions of neuroscientists on this subject, I imagine we can already agree that the brain’s ability to organize so many aural events in our acoustical environment is a spectacular achievement.

* * * * *

The use of music as background accompaniment has a long history. As early as the tenth century, groups of wandering students—the jongleurs and goliards—performed secular songs at weddings and other court celebrations while the jolly party-goers talked and laughed as they ate and drank. By the seventeenth century, composers were often commissioned to provide music as background for social occasions. Mozart made an instrumental version of his own aria from “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Non piu Andrai,” and he plays it as background entertainment during Don Giovanni’s last supper.

In twentieth-century America, selling music for background use became big business. By the 1930s, the Muzak corporation had installed recorded music in offices, in stores, and in the elevators we cannot escape, and soon the company developed packaged fifteen-minute segments to stimulate worker productivity in factories. The idea of background music so enchanted President Eisenhower that in 1952 he ordered that music be piped into the entire West Wing of the White House. I imagine that a high-ranking staff member who was trusted with programming the selections had to be given top security clearance before checking the sound quality in the Situation Room, and perhaps even in the executive bathrooms.

Today we can still find background music in our work places and in our bars and restaurants. On Seventh Avenue near 20th Street, there is a bar that plays loud music programmed by the management. Everyone who wants to have a conversation must yell to be heard. There is also a juke box which plays pop hits for a quarter. Customers sitting at the bar play them right along with the house music. From the restaurant tables in the back, you hear the house programmed background music, the people up front shouting at each other, and their favorite pop tunes on the juke box, all piled on top of each other. When I asked a few diners if the loud noises didn’t bother them, one said he really liked it, another, that she paid no attention. A guy over in a corner was reading a book. He said he was studying for an exam, and the music and the noise helped him concentrate. I left.

Out on the sidewalk there were people coming and going, almost all of them listening to music on portable devices – I could identify Brahms, Ice T, and Lady Gaga, leaking through various headphones.

On August 1, 1981, a television music channel was opened by a corporation called Music Television, or MTV. It developed a new format: major vocal stars in elaborately produced videos, featuring a singer or a group performing against lavish, fast-cutting backgrounds. The young audience that already worshipped these stars was dazzled by the pace.

Producers of television commercials, in order to capture the growing MTV audience, began adapting the quick-cut technique of the music videos to their advertisements. The competitive demand for attention led to ever-faster shifts from one scene to the next. Since commercials had only a minute or two to make their pitch, the producers built visual excitement by making the background pictures shorter and shorter, with more and more uneven cutting from scene to scene. Viewers, working hard to find a story line, soon realized there was none – only a variety of fast-moving pictures that often had no logical connection. The quick changes functioned as the selling pitch of the commercial – not the singers or the flashy music. The allure of the product lay not in the narrative skill of the video, or the star quality of the performers, but in the rat-a-tat rhythm of the picture cutting. The advertisers celebrated as sales of their products soared. 

Imagine what a school music teacher faces today with a classroom of young students fluent in TV - and in all the other “social media.” As their pocket wizards offer greater and greater speed of communication, they move easily from one abbreviated message to another. When I asked a young woman in her twenties how many people read her texts or her Tweets, or her Facebook messages every day, she said over seven hundred. I wonder how many of those ever become face-to-face friends, as they move in this jumpy existence from one brief personal contact to another, where learning to slow down and listen attentively is bombarded with so much distraction.

And there will not be much help from home. The parents, who grew up in the developing days of MTV and its followers, were often without music training during their own childhood, which means that today, among many of them, there is no interest in classical music, and you will not likely find a piano or other musical instrument in their homes, except maybe the occasional guitar or a drum set. Based on their own limited backgrounds, mom and dad may even have voted against a school budget request that provided for a classroom music teacher. It’s just not a priority for them.

In televising the Tennis Championships in New York in September, 2020, the producers could not decide which of two important matches to offer as each was approaching a climactic moment. So they showed both at the same time, splitting the television screen. They also allowed the commentator of one of the matches to continue his analysis; PLUS, they played music to ramp up the excitement. One could not watch both halves of the screen at the same time; but if one wanted, one could move back and forth from one to the other. At any one time the brain was required to accommodate three of the four sources – one of the matches, the commentator, and the background music. 

Since the arrival of cell phones with their high-tech earphones it has become easier to be distracted, to adhere almost to a second reality. The minute one exits the subway stairs, out onto the streets, or sits down at a restaurant, or leaves the office building and settles into a taxi, out comes the phone, and we ignore a companion, our children in the stroller, dangerous traffic at the street corner - even walking arm in arm with our lover, we are pulled by that other world in our ears.

What music has to say to us – all kinds of music ­­– can be profoundly affecting. Playing it in the background while focusing on some other activity, not only cheats the music of its most powerful expression; it fosters a habit of partial concentration that weakens later attempts at purposeful listening.

It deprives us of the best that music has to offer.

SOUNDS, NOT MUSIC – EXPLORING THE BRAIN FOR MUSICAL MEANING

In recent decades, the ability to identify increasing numbers of tonal reaction centers in the brain has excited scientists to the point where they imagine they are understanding human responses to music, rather than simply locating isolated sound events.

Writing for the Sunday Review in the New York Times of June 9, 2013, entitled, “Gray Matter - Why Music Makes Us Sing,” Robert J. Zatorre and Valerie N. Salimpoor locate the pleasure of listening to music “in the reward system deep in the brain. The music activates subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion,” a reward system “that causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine.” “In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music move us?” (Italics mine).This part of the brain is also "known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex, and … is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.” (1)

These results are misleading. The response to music cannot be calibrated according to chemical changes in one or more locations in the brain, in what the authors call “peak emotional moments that produce “a chill of pleasure. 

“It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.” - Psychologist Jerome Kagan (2)

“Brain imaging won’t help you to analyze Bach’s Art of Fugue or to interpret King Lear any more than it will unravel the concept of legal responsibility.” - Philosopher Roger Scruton (3)

Those “peak emotional moments” that Zatorre and Salimpoor measure, “the chill of pleasure,” have nothing to do with musical meaning. Since music develops through time, there can be no peak experience without the build-up that precedes it.

The so-called “dopamine high points” which offer and sustain no intensity, afford no musical climax, provide no resolution. They are extracted from context, like baseball highlight reels – tape-measure home runs, spectacular catches, lunging third strikes - one fast take upon another, which lose effectiveness because there is no buildup, no life in time, no sense of the gradual journey to the culmination that gives them their excitement.

Nevertheless, the notion of measuring musical enjoyment by its impact on specific areas of the brain has been spreading like an epidemic as technology provided newer and more sophisticated tools. The field developed quickly, as techniques covering a wide range of inquiries were developed, making the measurement of brain activity gradually more accurate. 

The Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman founded the Neurosciences Institute in New York, in 1981. This Institute carried out laboratory research in a number of areas, including molecular biology of gene regulation, cellular and systems neurophysiology, neural plasticity, genetics of behavior, syntactic processing of music and language, and the temporal dynamics of auditory perception.

COGNITIVE MUSICOLOGY, with the goals of understanding both music and cognition, developed alongside cognitive neuroscience of music – the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in hearing music, using such techniques as functional magnetic resonance imaging, trans cranial magnetic stimulation, magneto-encephalography, and electroencephalography. Scientists decided that the responses to these isolated inquiries could be used as the basis for understanding a whole range of musical experience.

“Evidently there is an intimate relation between the physical operation of the brain and our subjective experiences of music and everything else, but we don’t at the moment understand it… And to seek to understand music from the outside by studying the physical correlates of musical experience in the brain is to leave out what makes it music—the inner experience of hearing and producing it.” - Philosopher Thomas Nagel (4)

Laboratory interest in tracing musical sounds into the brain flourished. In a 2008 lecture at the San Diego Neurosciences Institute, Aniruddh Patel articulated the principal goal of cognitive neuroscience of music: “How the brain responds to music and how music can tell us how the brain works itself.” (5) (italics mine)

Here are some results of experiments aimed at discovering locations in the brain “where pleasurable auditory reactions took place.”

“Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system…we provide direct evidence for endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening….These findings help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.”

“Music is strongly associated with the brain’s reward system.…Neuroscientists believe there’s basically one pleasure mechanism, and music is one route into it. Drugs are another.”

And finally, a detailed report. Let’s not forget – the subject of this complex statement is music:

“Parallel generational tasks for music and language were compared using positron emission tomography. Amateur musicians vocally improvised melodic or linguistic phrases in response to unfamiliar, auditorily presented melodies or phrases. Core areas for generating melodic phrases appeared to be in left Brodmann area (BA) 45, right BA 44, bilateral temporal planum polare, lateral BA 6, and pre-SMA. Core areas for generating sentences seemed to be in bilateral posterior superior and middle temporal cortex (BA 22, 21), left BA 39, bilateral superior frontal (BA 8, 9), left inferior frontal (BA 44, 45), anterior cingulate, and pre-SMA. Direct comparisons of the two tasks revealed activations in nearly identical functional brain areas, including the primary motor cortex, supplementary motor area, Broca’s area, anterior insula, primary and secondary auditory cortices, temporal pole, basal ganglia, ventral thalamus, and posterior cerebellum… With these and related findings, we outline a comparative model of shared, parallel, and distinctive features of the neural systems supporting music and language.”

This approach to musical sounds exposes only the location in the brain where it is received. It does not deal with the expressive quality of music as we experience it.

“Music is made of sound, yes, but only in the same way as painting is made of colored pigment, canvas, rabbit glue and so on, in the same way as drawings are made of lines. No one these days would defend a view according to which the significance of a painting can be elicited by really efficient color spectography.” - Chaim Tannenbaum, philosopher and musician (6)

One of the most active and influential proselytizers of the neuroscientific approach to understanding music is Daniel J. Levitin, whose book This Is Your Brain on Music was published in 2006.(7) Levitin teaches at McGill University, in Canada, where he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise. He is a former jazz musician, sound engineer, and recording producer, and is fluent in all kinds of music. His researches and interests are wide-ranging.

Dr. Levitin agrees with his colleagues that the sources of musical experience in the brain can be clinically identified: 

“At a deeper level, the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive, reptilian regions of the cerebellar vermis, and the amygdyla - the heart of emotional processing in the cortex…” (8)

In 2009, Levitin’s ideas were the subject of a two-hour documentary broadcast on PBS, entitled “The Music Instinct, Science and Song.”

The voice of the narrator states a basic theme of the program:

“This journey of exploration into music takes us into the musical body and brain, into the essence of our emotions.” (9)

 Dr. Levitin turns to his theme:

“How do you take something that’s as imprecise as emotion and make it rigorous and subject it to scientific study?” (10)

He wants to “take something as imprecise as emotion, in all its richness” and from laboratory responses to a series of isolated tonal moments, extrapolate a theory of musical understanding.

“The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s contribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system.” (11) 

Surprisingly, Daniel Levitin himself quotes in his book a neurosurgeon who once told Daniel Dennett, “(a prominent and persuasive spokesperson for functionalism), that he had operated on hundreds of people and seen hundreds of live, thinking brains, but he had never seen a thought.” (12)

“When you look at a painting or read a poem your brain no doubt undergoes electrochemical activity. [But] the artwork is the object of the mental act of apprehending it; it is not the mental act in which it is apprehended. So we cannot claim to study beauty-in-objects by studying the human psychological response to beauty.” - Philosopher Colin McGinn (13)

Dissonance and Consonance

The observation of the secretion of dopamine in experiments by Levitin and his colleagues, led them to equate pleasant and unpleasant sounds with consonant and dissonant music. Consonant sounds are deemed pleasant; dissonant, unpleasant. 

Levitin: “Some sounds strike us as unpleasant, although we don’t know why.…Some people find particular intervals or chords particularly unpleasant…Musicians refer to pleasing-sounding chords and intervals as consonant and the unpleasing ones as dissonant.…So far, we’ve been able to figure out that the brain-stem and the dorsal cochlear nucleus - structures that are so primitive that all vertebrates have them – can distinguish between consonance and dissonance….There is widespread agreement about some of the intervals that are deemed consonant.” (9)

Wrong! Like reactions to experience, and to human personalities, the notion of pleasant and unpleasant musical sounds in music has varied through the ages and across the continents. The interval of an augmented fourth was prohibited in European medieval and Renaissance church music. Repeated drum patterns in Asian music, Asian scales and some African drumming music is unpleasant to many westerners, pleasant to others. And Carnegie Hall subscribers will very quickly give you a list of music they find dissonant (they call it modern), and can't understand why enough people like it enough to put it on the program. Furthermore, responses to music are much too nuanced to be categorized as pleasant or unpleasant.

“It has been discovered that individual judgments of consonance can be enormously modified by training. Perceptions of consonance by adult standards do not seem generally valid for children below the age of twelve or thirteen, a strong indication that they are learned responses.” - Norman Cazden, composer (13)

“Ideas about consonance and dissonance also change with experience.” - Composer Igor Stravinsky (14)

Summarizing, we can say that cognitive neuroscientists

• reduce the experience of music to numerically calibrated measurements of stimuli conveyed by the auditory system to specific locations in the brain, and

• limit reactions to music to false dichotomies, such as pleasurable or not pleasurable, and dissonant or consonant - denying the richness of the musical experience, and ignore the fact that not all cultures, or listeners in the same culture, respond the same way to the same music.
  

“The scientific research that hopes to understand how a human being responds to the magic of music has never interested me because I am not a scientist and my experience follows its own inward, intuitive and emotional expression that reasons with my brain, and I understand music in a way that can’t be put down in equations and principles.” (15) - Robert Mann, founding first violinist, The Juilliard String Quartet

NOTES

1. Robert Zatorre et al, New York Times, June 9, 2013

2. Jerome Kagan, Quoted by David Brooks, NY Times, June 17, 2013.

3. Roger Scruton, The Spectator, 17th March, 2012

4. Robert Nagel, letter to the author, 2013

5. Patel, lecture, Jan 22, 2008; Uploaded, California Television (UCTV)

6. Chaim Tannenbaum - statement to the author, NYC, NY 2011

7. Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, Penguin Group USA, 2006

8. ibid p. 85

9. “The Music Instinct – Science and Song,” PBS

10. ibid

11. Daniel Levitin, op.cit. p. 187

12. ibid. p. 92

13. Colin McGinn, “What Can Your Neurons Tell You?” Review of The Good, The True, and The Beautiful: A Neuronal Approach by Jean-Pierre Changun, New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013 – pp.49f

14. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1947, p.34

15. Robert Mann, founding first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, Statement to the author, NYC, 2012

Inside Two Great Orchestras - Part 2, Episode 4

PART II Episode 4

This is the final blog episode of excerpts from Anshel Brusilow’s memoir,  SHOOT THE CONDUCTOR, written with Robin Underdahl and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2015. 

Because our music was beautiful and moved our audiences, we were always supposed to be poker-faced. Who can do that? Especially on those grueling tours. We developed radar, constantly looking for something to amuse us.

We always had a couple of encore pieces at the ready, usually a Bach air or an arioso. Something guaranteed to please. Ormandy had to decide when an encore was required and then work the transition. Often the last piece on the program was something weighty, and he would say to the audience, in his winsome way, “What can we offer you after Tchaikovsky?”

Our cellist Sam Belenko had a sonorous basso voice. Once when Ormandy asked his question of the audience, he got a reply from the orchestra in that deep voice: “NOTHING.” Sam’s head was down, but everyone knew who said it.

Never had Ormandy gotten so honest an answer. He had to know his whole orchestra could barely contain itself. But he pulled out one of the Bachs with a straight face, and we recovered our composure.

We rolled through the country on the train—Chicago, St. Louis, eventually California. Toward the end it seemed like we were playing the Rosenkavalier Suite almost every night. John de Lancie and I found a way to stave off boredom. At the place where a short violin solo interacts with an oboe obbligato, we developed a kind of guessing game. The solo is really just part of a waltz and not written with the intention that the violinist will do anything special with it. But the trip was so long! I would add a little finesse, a little extra seasoning of a different flavor every time. John could see by my bow what I was up to, and he was quick to follow, playing simultaneously with me and matching the flavor.

One thing Ormandy hated above all else was losing his best players to another orchestra. In 1963, our principal cellist Lorne Munroe turned in his resignation so he could join the New York Philharmonic.

“Why on earth would he want to go play up there with that group when he can be in the Philadelphia Orchestra?”

“Can’t imagine, Boss.”

“Find me someone, Anshel.”

“Listen to Bill Stokking in the cellos.”

“Who?”

Well, there were a lot of us in his orchestra; I suppose he forgot some of us. “William Stokking—that guy in the back. Wavy brown hair.”

The next day Bill Stokking played for Ormandy and me. Ormandy turned to me, stunned. “He reminds me of Emanuel Feuermann!” He referred to the cellist who had died twenty years earlier and ascended to reign over cello heaven. I told Bill he’d done well.

A few days later Ormandy was beaming. “You’ll never guess who I got!”

I couldn’t.

“Sammy Mayes! Sucked him right out of Boston.”

One thing Ormandy loved above all else was fleecing another orchestra of its best players. Sammy Mayes was a marvelous cellist. In my head I still revisit playing the gorgeous second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Sammy Mayes and with Gary Graffman at the piano. It’s nicknamed the “triple concerto” because Tchaikovsky does virtually transform it into a concerto for piano, cello, and violin in the second movement. Ten minutes of musical unity and pleasure can last the rest of one’s life.

Bill Stokking lost out there. However, he was to have his day yet. Eventually Ormandy hired him as principal cellist.

I was to conduct a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in their summer home, Robin Hood Dell:  Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Stravinsky was to be in the audience, and we had a great talk together before the concert.

“Don’t do it the way the others do.  They rewrite it to make it easier to conduct.  The rhythms are important, and I don’t like them changed.  All conductors are guilty of fraud.”

We Philadelphia musicians knew when and where the reviews would show up, and we knew all the local reviewers. The next day a review appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That was normal. Oddly, I’d never heard of the reviewer. No one else knew her either. She found the concert to be nothing special. Did she not notice the audience’s response?

Stranger yet, the Evening Bulletin had no review at all. Both newspapers always reviewed the orchestra performances.

About a week later James Felton, the Evening Bulletin’s regular music critic, told me what happened.

“Anshel, I’m so sorry! We were all out of town. Our bosses said it was mandatory that we cover the announcement in Saratoga Springs.” He was speaking for all the regular music critics of the Philadelphia newspapers, and I appreciated his candor. What he explained was that every music critic had had to attend a press conference 270 miles away. “The board” of the Philadelphia Orchestra was announcing the orchestra’s new plans for a summer festival. It had to be announced at the future location of the festival, not in Philadelphia. And although it was two years in the future, the announcement could not be given at any other time except the evening when I was conducting The Rite of Spring.

“I don’t know who the young woman was who reviewed your concert,” James Felton said. “But I do know that she was told just how to write it up.”

Of course every musician knew that Ormandy was behind the board’s press conference. He had the newspapers in his back pocket. The lesson I was supposed to be learning was that it was dangerous to conduct in his city.

Sometimes Ormandy wanted to get rid of a player. For years he weeded out those who had played under Stokowski. Luckily for me, my dear assistant concertmaster, Dave Madison, had an engaging personality that kept him off Ormandy’s shit list. Few others from the Stokowski era were exempt.

“I want to move So-and-so farther back,” Ormandy would occasionally say. “He’s not pulling his weight.”

Knowing how random personality traits could annoy him, I almost always objected to these demotions, and most of the time he deferred to my judgment. I never told the players.

Once he fixed in his crosshairs a player in the back of the second violins. It started with dark looks on a Monday. A frustrated sideways whipping of the baton to stop us all while he glared at this man followed, and we had to back up a few bars.

The next day rehearsal hadn’t gone more than three minutes before he started in. “You’ve been playing this music for twenty years. Do you think you could make the effort to learn it now?”

Conducting was not something I was prepared to give up. If push came to shove, I would give up the violin bow before I would give up the baton. I typed up my resignation again and this time really sent it to the board president, C. Wanton Balis. As it happened, I forgot to sign it. It was accepted nonetheless.

Ormandy’s feelings were mixed. He had to get this competing conductor out of his orchestra—out of his city! But he wanted the concertmaster. He asked me to stay while he searched for my replacement.

Once during that last year with the Philadelphia Orchestra, we were all standing around at 30th Street Station waiting for a train to Baltimore for a concert. Ormandy motioned me aside.

“Why would you give this up, Anshel? It’s the best job in the world.”

“I have to.”

“Do you want more money? I could get that.”

“Boss, I really want to conduct.”

“You’d be miserable. It’s a headache!”

Boris Sokoloff, the orchestra manager, joined us. “How do you know what orchestra you’ll get?” he asked. “It certainly won’t be on the level of Philadelphia.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Ormandy snapped. “A musician like Anshel will succeed wherever he goes!”

I could hardly give a better example of relating to Ormandy. His head was so full of contradictory opinions that he himself didn’t know which one was coming out of his mouth next.

His brilliant conducting continued to amaze and educate me, even as our relationship became ever more unpredictable. I watched closely how he managed to accompany soloists so that they felt completely comfortable with the orchestra. Of course he knew the solo part as well as the soloist.

Memory has a sovereignty all its own, and mine gives me no access to Ormandy’s farewell, though it was probably kind. I do have a photograph of the final handshake on stage.

What I remember is a conversation I had with him shortly after returning to Philadelphia from the tour.

I wanted to be up front about the new Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia I was putting together. Of course he knew about it, but I went to his office to tell him how auditions were going.

“I’m happy for you. I really do wish you success,” Dr. Jekyll said.

Not smart enough to quit while I was ahead, I said, “But it’s really too bad the Chamber Orchestra couldn’t continue. The players loved it and so did I.”

Mr. Hyde emerged. “You took my best players—musicians I had selected and trained. With one or two lousy rehearsals, you played to large audiences and took all the accolades. I couldn’t let that continue. You promised you wouldn’t conduct. You promised to stay at least ten years. You lied on all counts.”

Some months later, when I was no longer in the Philadelphia Orchestra, my chamber orchestra was doing well. Audiences were large, reviewers raved. Westinghouse wanted a TV special.

In the midst of the excitement, I was also planning our second season. We needed soloists, and Rudolf Firkusny came to mind. A great pianist and a friend of mine, surely he’d want to play with us.

And maybe he would have. I never found out.

Our manager Sam Flor sent a request to Firkusny’s manager at CAMI. No reply. When I prodded Sam to get an answer, he called the CAMI manager again.

“Firkusny’s not available to us,” Sam reported.

“Why not?”

“Because we can’t use any of that manager’s artists.”

This locked out only a dozen or so soloists, but for some reason it made me mad.

When I’m mad I should go stick my head in the sand. Instead, I picked up the phone and called the guy at CAMI. I knew him somewhat and had found him personable.

“Any soloist who performs with your Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia,” he said, “is unlikely to be engaged by Ormandy again.”

After almost seven years, Brusilow left the concertmaster’s chair of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1966, to form the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia.  He became conductor of the Dallas Symphony, and later accepted a teaching-performing-conducting post with the University of North Texas in Denton. Anshel Brusilow died in 1998, a few months short of his 90th birthday.

---

Anshel Brusilow on conducting:

“Conducting is a misunderstood profession: you wave your hands and the orchestra plays.  Of course, you can just do that, and most musicians will keep playing. But it is hard on them.

In order to do their job, they need something from you. Your personal interpretation, in fact your personality, needs to come through all your expressions and movements. You have to communicate with them in a hundred ways, not just with your stick.

And then – just as important ­- you have to get out of the way and let the musicians run.  Sound is best when an instrument vibrates maximally, which happens when the musician is relaxed.  It doesn’t happen when you terrorize your players.  The heavy-handed conductor may get perfection without getting any real music.”

SHOOT THE CONDUCTOR, p.239

Inside Two Great Orchestras - Part 2, Episode 2 and 3

Anshel Brusilow as Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy – PART II, EPISODES 2 snd 3

Part II Episode 2

Nineteen years after leaving the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski finally received an invitation from Eugene Ormandy to guest conduct in February, 1960. Stokowski had raised the orchestra from regional to international acclaim, and yet never been invited back. This is most unusual. What can have prevented the conventional honor normally shown to a previous conductor of long tenure?

The usual answer flies to the sticky subject of Stokowski’s supposed sexual exploits. Now the board member whose wife’s name was too intimately tied with Stokowski’s was no longer associated with us. Surely it was merely that indelicate situation that had delayed the invitation.

Stokowski’s return was a major event in Philadelphia. The newspapers reminded us of all he had done to polish the orchestra, which gave luster to the city. Those few members of the orchestra who dated back to the previous era were jittery, spreading their anticipation to the rest of us—“He’s coming back! Three concerts!” Dave Madison had told me what concerts had been like back then, the godlike aura he managed to exude as he strode onto the stage, a magnificent specimen of humanity, six foot two with gleaming white hair that swooped over his head like meringue.

I remembered his visits to New Orleans and San Francisco. He had impressed me more than any conductor I had ever played for, even though I could not see myself opting for such a showy style. It was the vigor of his conducting that thrilled the players. His changes to scores attracted criticism, but I thought they were usually justified. When an orchestra is paying 110 players, the board is displeased to come to a concert and find only 80 of them on stage, even if the composer wrote parts only for 80. So in pieces written for smaller orchestras, Stokowski would add instruments and write the parts, not necessarily introducing new notes.

We sounded different under Stokowski. It was partly his added transcription to the scores. But also the force of his leadership. We sounded however he wanted us to sound. Of course the Philadelphians gave him curtain calls. When he returned the third time, he motioned for the audience to sit. First, he gave the smile. Such a knowing smile, boyish even on the old man. Knowing, specifically, that many of the women in the audience were suffering rapid heartbeats.

Then he spoke: “As I was saying—”

The audience erupted in laughter. They were still in love with him. He said generous things about the orchestra, its continued quality, about Ormandy’s work with us, about the dedication of our board. He paved the way for annual return visits.

In February of 1962, Stokowski had Scheherazade on the program for us, Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite full of violin solos. Afterwards he sent me a kind letter, which I still treasure. Here are words from him that thrilled this musician’s heart:

“[Scheherazade] has nostalgic qualities which are different from any other music I know, and your playing showed that you completely understood this unique mood. For example, at the beginning of the 4th movement your first solo had that kind of dreamy tenderness it should have, and the next solo the powerful agitation and even brutality that is its character.”

That’s what we all want to do. Really get what the composer meant.

During that visit, we played the piece Stokowski’s way on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Sunday—with no rehearsal— the orchestra recorded Scheherazade with Ormandy, effortlessly switching back to his way.

Writers about music often mention the long shadow of Stokowski. Anyone close to the five-foot-five Ormandy knew that, in his own mind, no height of musical achievement could add to his actual stature. He was a short man. The extra-high podium helped, but not enough. Obviously, height has nothing to do with conducting talent, and others have found it no hindrance. but for Ormandy it was a problem. Stokowski’s physical height alone was enough to haunt Ormandy. Add in Stokowski’s dancer-like grace, the head of hair, the magnetism he exercised over women, and his glamorous style of batonless conducting, and up rises a shadow perfectly designed to torment a profoundly talented but sensitive man like Ormandy. Who could compete with the elegant silhouette we all knew from Walt Disney’s Fantasia?

Most of the time, Ormandy looked out for me. When I tore my pant leg on the way to a Monday night concert, he lent me a pair of his own pants. (I wore them as low as possible.) He wasn’t even above sharing his personal secrets for avoiding embarrassing oversights onstage. He always checked his pants zipper before he walked on, and he told me to do the same.

“It’s too late when you’re onstage. Your full dress jacket won’t cover it. I call it the glissando.” He demonstrated, sliding his finger up and down the zipper as you would make a glissando on a string instrument by sliding your finger up and down the string.

How could I not be reminded of Szell’s interpretation of the glissando in “Till Eulenspiegel” as the moment when Till turns and pees down from the steeple?

In a candid moment, Ormandy told me about an experience he had when he was conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony and still quite young. He arrived at the hall for rehearsal. The players didn’t know he was there yet, and he overheard one saying to another, “That Ormandy is a son of a bitch.”

Appalled, he closed himself in his office. This was intolerable! What should he do? He phoned Arthur Judson, his manager at Columbia Artists Management, Inc. (CAMI).

“You won’t believe what I just heard. A member of my orchestra called me an S.O.B! Behind my back, but still—how can they dare?”

Judson burst out laughing. “Ormandy! Congratulations. You’ve just become a conductor.”

PART II Episode 3

In 1961, the Philadelphia Orchestra embarked on a transcontinental tour that would go to California and end in New York. It began in Ann Arbor with our traditional May festival.

We packed ourselves into a train and headed south to Indiana. I was less squeezed than others, since Ormandy arranged a large private compartment for me. This was necessary to accommodate the card games we players always had going, though perhaps that was not in the boss’s mind.

In Fort Wayne, we performed in an old movie theater. Of course the dressing room space was inadequate. Ormandy kindly invited me to share his room.

In the performance, we came to the final piece of the concert, Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. We had played it in Philadelphia just a month earlier and Ormandy had conducted it most impressively from memory.

We began, and quickly I noticed that his movements were rote. In fact, it was like watching my grandmother wash clothes on a washboard. His arms moved up and down without even completing the standard fourfold movement of conducting— the sequence of down, left, right, up. He gave no direction to the strings or woodwinds, and did not even pull the brass in at their entry. His music stand was empty. But he really did know Petrouchka inside out.

Just at that moment, I looked around and saw the musicians beginning to be disconcerted. Stravinsky is difficult music. Sweating, I shifted toward the orchestra to make eye contact with various section leaders and raised my violin a bit so the bow was more visible, to help them until our conductor got his bearing.

Ormandy still raised and lowered his arms mechanically. On his face was a look of frozen fear. His beats were not even in the right places, as if not a single note of Stravinsky’s piece was available to his mind. He was wandering in a territory all his own.

We knew this work. I was sure we could play it decently, if we could just all keep together. I felt completely unprepared for what I had to do, but there was simply no choice. The players had to follow something, and in this case it wasn’t going to be Ormandy. Fortunately, the bowing action adds to the visibility of a violin, but it was not enough. I knew that. With my head, my feet, my elbows too, I tried to lead the orchestra. A lesser group of musicians could never have gotten through such a difficult piece in this way, but somehow the others saw what they needed and played where they were supposed to. What a great sigh of relief ran through us all when we reached the end.

The audience, I think, was none the wiser. They even required an encore.

I knew Ormandy would not want to see anyone, and I wished my things were out with everyone else’s. But I had to go into his dressing room because we were sharing. I would just retrieve my stuff and get out of there fast.

He stood staring into a large mirrored wall. Which meant that he was facing me in the mirror.

I started packing my violin quickly.

“What did I do? What did I do?” he said.

“Boss, Petrouchka’s a difficult work.”

“I know. But what did I do?”

“Well,” I said, “you made it more difficult.” I would really like to revisit that moment and think of something more helpful to say. I just haven’t thought of it yet.

Two days later Ormandy conducted Petrouchka perfectly from memory. What happened to him can happen to any of us.

Final Episode 4 to follow.

Inside Two Great Orchestras - Part 2, Episode 1

Excerpts from SHOOT THE CONDUCTOR
by Anshel Brusilow and Robin Underdahl

Introduction to Part II

Anshel Brusilow, a violinist and conductor, was assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell.  He later became  concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. 

I have published 4 excerpts in Part I from Shoot The Conductor, which Brusilow wrote with Robin Underdahl. Those excerpts cover Brusilow’s tenure as assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra. You  can find Part I in earlier blogs.  Part II, with 4 episodes, will follow Brusilow as Ormandy’s concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Part II - Episode 1: Brusilow arrives as Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra

FINALLY, THE DAY CAME – my first rehearsal as the new concertmaster. Most of the musicians were onstage, and I certainly didn’t want to be last. But Ormandy stopped me.

“Don’t go out. I’ll introduce you.”

I was nervous. I followed him out, and the players continued chatting and fiddling with their instruments until they finally noticed that I was with their conductor.

And that surprised me. Here the players did not instinctively freeze in place when the conductor came through the stage door, as they had with Szell.

Ormandy introduced me and I was surrounded by friendly greetings. I asked principal oboist John de Lancie for his “A” and tuned the woodwinds and listened until they sounded good, and gave them my nod. But as I went on to tune the brass, and then the strings to the same note, I was thinking about Bill Kincaid, principal flutist. He hadn’t looked up once. While you tune a section as concertmaster, normally each player is looking at you because you are going to nod or else signal for raising or lowering. But Bill was not going to meet my eyes to get my approval.

I had offended him when, at sixteen, I won the conducting contest and conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Polovtsian Dances. I had asked Bill Kincaid to change his  phrasing, to the delight of his rival, Marcel Tabuteau.  Tabuteau had retired, but here was Bill Kincaid displaying ill will.

When Ormandy stepped onto the podium and asked the orchestra to please be quiet, I forgot all about that.  He said please!

We haven’t got much time before the tour.  Let’s start with the Overture to “Die Meistersinger.”

The orchestra played the opening chord, C Major.  I lowered my violin and simply listened.

My assistant concertmaster Dave Madison said, “Are you okay?”

It was the sound. That sound like no other orchestra, the lush sound I had always known, now vibrated all around me.  I was overwhelmed.

“Are you all right?” Ormandy asked.

“I’m fine.”

There I was concertmaster of one of the greatest orchestras in the world.

By this time, I had discovered the usefulness of buying the full score of whatever we were playing. The interest in hearing all the other instruments had expanded into a desire to see all the parts paralleled on the page. I liked knowing how the music I made fit into the larger picture. Then once I knew my own part, my orientation to the whole freed me to look at the conductor rather than my music.

The conductor’s preparation begins with working through a score and marking it with his preferences. The orchestra librarian copies the markings onto the music for each instrument as applicable. Ormandy encouraged me to change the bowings for the violins any way I wished, but suggested that I consider the skill levels of the whole section as I did so. In addition, I could call out instructions for the violins as they occurred to me at rehearsals.

At an early rehearsal, I turned to the section and said, “Slur the next two bars, and start up bow.”

“God damn it! What’s wrong with the way it is?” came from somewhere toward the back.

Many of the players had been in the orchestra back when Stokowski was conductor. Along came I, all of thirty-one years old, telling them how to play.

We came to another section where Ormandy made a change that I thought required a bowing adjustment.

“At number 370, start up bow and change four bars later.” Again I heard the discordant voice.

When my third change provoked a grumble, I stood and asked Ormandy for a moment’s break. Having placed the voice, I made my way to the back of the first violin section and leaned over Herman Weinberg’s white hair to whisper to him. Then I straightened and said, “Okay, Herman?”

He smiled and nodded in agreement, and I returned to my chair and thanked Ormandy. The rehearsal continued.

In my view, a conductor’s skill shows most in his ability to accompany a soloist. Ormandy was able to grant enormous flexibility to soloists, giving them full freedom to go wherever the music led, and still he could bring the orchestra alongside at every moment. During my first year in Philadelphia I marveled at him again and again, whether following Gary Graffman playing Tchaikovsky piano concertos or Hilde Gueden singing. I had experienced it before as a soloist, but I gained a different appreciation of his excellence in accompaniment as I participated in the orchestra.

The bond between Ormandy and me was very strong. No one would call him a humble man, but the real beauty of music brought out a humility in him, a profound respect for both the composer and the performer. It was a joy to play for someone who so thoroughly loved the music right along with you. Where beauty is perceived and expressed, love is not too strong a word to describe the response, and those who respond to beauty together, also feel bound to each other.

The Tiffany clock he gave Marilyn and me for Christmas in 1959 still sits in our living room. Taped to the box was an envelope so tiny it fits in the palm of my hand, containing a note saying that he loved me as a father. And I did feel that he treated me as a son. Of course, he and Gretel had no children.

I felt comfortable with Ormandy from the start. “Would you like me to pick you and Mrs. Ormandy up?” I offered for one of our early out-of-town concerts.

“Sure! That would be great.”

The Ormandys began to rely on my chauffeuring. We laughed a lot in the car. Whenever Mrs. Ormandy came along to New York, she would send a stagehand to the Carnegie Deli to get us corned beef sandwiches for the drive home.

“What did you get for sweets?” was always Ormandy’s question.

At the end of my first concert with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Ormandy bowed and left the stage. As usual, continuing applause called him back for a second bow, and a third. When he left the stage the third time, it seemed to me that the audience had stopped applauding.

Here again, protocol dictates the concertmaster’s moves. When the applause for the conductor stops, the concertmaster stands and exits, and then the members of the orchestra follow. Since the audience had quieted down, I started to make my way toward the side. But then the applause resurged. Offstage, Ormandy heard this and began to return, so that we encountered each other on stage.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“The applause stopped.” “No, it didn’t,” he said.

I continued off stage, and he continued on. Who knows what the audience made of that?

When it was time to leave, I brought my car around to the stage door for the Ormandys. He was already talking as he climbed into the front seat. “Why on earth did you walk off while they were still clapping for me?”

Mrs. Ormandy rescued me: “Gene, the applause did stop for a short time.” “I have too many friends in the audience to have the applause stop!” he informed us both.