Being a human

eighth blackbird gave a really great masterclass at Northwestern this morning. They played some pieces and gave everyone some lovely and helpful and non-critical tidbits about their career(s) and how to be a musician and a human at the same time. It's lovely to be at a masterclass with people who have that aspiration. It shows. We left curious and charged-up and full of ideas, rather than pissed off and slighted, like after most masterclasses with composers who roll in and either say they like the piece or claim it isn't a composition or "this piano part isn't written for the piano," which don't even get me started on that stupid comment.

Top experience was hearing and seeing 8bb's performance of Stephen Hartke's Meanwhile, which was rife with a bunch of pleasing individual musical moments. They played the piece memorized (!, totally new experience for me in new music concertgoing) and with choreography, walking about the stage, looking at each other, interacting. I wasn't interested in the idea of the choreography beforehand, but was amazed at how much it added to the experience for me. I've always been strangely apathetic about the Pierrot ensemble, possibly because I'm bitter at all the foiled compositional efforts it has led me to, but this Hartke piece and their expert rendering made me feel like something was actually HAPPENING up there. I'm also grateful for the theatrical element because, as in Crumb's music and a Feldman solo like The King of Denmark and some minimalism and what not, it makes me feel like I'm getting a special experience by being there live to hear it, an experience I wouldn't get by just downloading it from iTunes.

I could go on about the positive attributes this group has. Some of them seem unattainable: this is a group that met as undergraduates and just "decided" to stay together, going to Cincinnati for an AD program in chamber music and then, again all together, to Northwestern to get Masters degrees. That just never happens. But most of their examples are fully imitable: memorizing the music, living with the same pieces for a long time because you believe in them, being unpretentious and human on stage. And STANDING UP when you can. I love that! They advised a student chamber group to stand while playing, and just like that, they went from being a student chamber group to a Czech dance band in a barn somewhere. Maybe it's just that subconsciously I want all of my musical experiences to take place in a barn. What does that say about my career prospects, I wonder.