It’s hard to believe, but the end of the Jacksonville Symphony season is nearly upon us. We’re closing it next weekend with concerts of Debussy and Wagner, which include ninety minutes of one of Wagner’s greatest operas, Götterdämmerung, or The Twilight of the Gods. Of all classical composers, it’s fair to say that none creates in the listener such strong feelings of either passion or revulsion as Richard Wagner. As someone who loves his music, I’m always a little suspicious of people who don’t; in my experience the dismissal is usually a convenient front for not knowing the music especially well, or an attempt to dodge a political bullet rather than taking the time to navigate the treacherous waters of Wagner’s music and writings. So

Continue readingAn Introduction to Wagner and “The Ring of the Nibelung”

A friend recently asked me, “How do you hear everything the orchestra plays?” I’m going to interpret this as asking how a conductor can hear the sound of the orchestra in enough detail to allow him to change it. Change that could be anything from mundane tasks like spotting wrong notes in rehearsal, to long-term goals that only take place over the course of four or five seasons, such as building a distinctive “home sound” for the orchestra by influencing its style of playing. From a very young age, we musicians are trained to hear music inside our heads with ferocious accuracy. There are many systems of training around the world, but they all work towards musical literacy, which basically means being able to read

Continue readingHow can a conductor hear everything the orchestra plays?