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Category Archives: Music
Registration for 2015-16 Education Programming Opens July 27
Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero works with a student during Side-by-Side Concert rehearsals, May 20, 2015
Registration for many of the Nashville Symphony’s education programs for the 2015-2016 season will open on Monday, July 27 at 11 a.m.
Sumer Is Icumen In
the earliest known copy of Sumer Is Icumin In; British Library Harley 978 folio 11v
When I was an elementary and middle school music teacher (1991 – 2007), I structured a lot of my curriculum – especially the songs I chose to teach my students – around the seasons. While it may seem like an obvious educational strategy, I think it is important to stress the value of this. Children in our society are living in environments that are increasingly divorced from any sense of connection with the natural world. Part of a music teacher’s mission is to give children not only a developed set of skills but also a generous survey (content) of our musical tradition, and the music literature – especially the song repertoire – includes a wide variety of examples of the use of music to evoke, celebrate, and otherwise honor many aspects of the natural world from which we come – and which we are still a part of, whether we recognize it or not.
The End of the Season
The Nashville Symphony Chorus assembled moments before a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66, May 29, 2015
For months the chorus met to learn their parts,
Taking time from family, work, and school;
Bolting a snack on the way to rehearsal
To arrive in their seats in time for the downbeat.
The orchestra’s sound only imagined,
Or for those to whom this weekly work has come
To hold a place of honor in their lives,
A memory of previous performances.
How Anna Joined The Symphony
This is the story of how Anna joined the Nashville Symphony.
Nashville Symphony Principal Keyboard Robert Marler takes Anna for a test drive on the stage of Laura Turner Hall
It’s a bit of a convoluted tale – like many stories, some unexpected things happened, one thing led to another, and once you start trying to find all the threads in the fabric you realize that the real beginnings probably go back a lot further than you originally thought.
Anna is a ten year old double-manual Franco-Flemish harpsichord.
Keith Jarrett Turns 70
Keith turns seventy today. For those reading this who are not familiar with him, Keith Jarrett is an American treasure, and one of the most important musicians alive today. He is among the most accomplished improvising musicians in history and we are fortunate that we live in the age of recording technology: we have a voluminous record of his career spanning nearly five decades that catalogs his development as an artist, as well as many of his experiments and side-projects. In addition to his stature now as senior jazz statesman, Keith is also an accomplished performer of classical music, with many recordings of Bach and Mozart, etc. as well as music of 20th century composers (including himself) to his credit.
I realize that beginning a post with superlatives is contentious, but considering Keith and his life as a musician, it seems fitting to me – he has been nothing if not controversial. Through his entire career Keith has very much followed his own path, refusing to compromise on his ideals even to his own detriment. Looking back on his career as he enters his eighth decade, I am not familiar with any other pianist who has accomplished such profound music-making as both jazz and classical artist. I am aware of no other musician of any genre or instrument who has filled concert halls consistently for decades with audiences who come to hear completely improvised solo concerts, led several acclaimed jazz ensembles including the longest lived (more than 30 years) and most respected piano trio still performing today, and devoted a substantial amount of time (more than a decade) and energy to recording and performing classical music, as a soloist and concerto performer, and as a composer. There is nobody else who has done this, nor done it so well, nor for so long.
One on a Part
Or, Making Lemonade at the Symphony
When the ice storm hit Nashville in February 2015, schools were closed for more than a week. Two weeks later – at the beginning of March – schools were closed again for a snow storm. As a result, the Nashville Symphony had to cancel three mornings of Young People’s Concerts at Schermerhorn and a run-out concert to a local high school: we missed 7 performances, which would have put the orchestra in front of around 10,000 students total.
When the weather had passed and all the staff were able to get back in the hall at the same time we held a meeting to comb the calendar for the possibility of making up these canceled events – our Young People’s Concerts (YPCs) are the symphony’s flagship education program, an important component in the execution of our education mission. Usually these concerts are scheduled more than a year in advance, due to the difficulty in finding times when the availability of the orchestra, the conductor, scheduled guest artists, the MNPS school calendar, and the hall all line up and allow time not only for performances but rehearsals also. Young People’s Concerts are written into the initial schedule for the orchestra each year for this reason – it’s nearly impossible to find adequate dates and times when all these elements align mid-season.
And so it proved.
Boy Wonder
The Nashville Symphony warms up in the pit at TPAC’s jackson Hall before a performance of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream with the Nashville Ballet, April 24, 2015
Nashville Symphony musicians are in the process of performing in three programs featuring the music of the German Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn. Beginning last Friday through Sunday, the symphony accompanied the Nashville Ballet in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at TPAC’s Jackson Hall.
Then (TONIGHT) Wednesday evening, April 29, symphony violinist Jessica Blackwell leads two string ensembles in performances of Mendelssohn’s famous Octet, as well as the Prelude and Scherzo, Op. 11 for string octet by Dmitri Shostakovich, as part of our ongoing Onstage series of free chamber music performances at Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
Finally, beginning (TOMORROW) Thursday, April 30 with performances following on Friday, May 1 and Saturday May 2, the symphony will perform Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with guest soloist Benjamin Pasternack in a program that also includes music by contemporary composer Frank Tichelli and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”.
Brahms Requiem at West End UMC
Brahms Requiem at West End United Methodist Church, April 19, 2015
This weekend I was reminded of the embarrassment of riches we have in Music City. The symphony presented fabulous concerts on Friday and Saturday, featuring two works by American composer Michael Daugherty, both recent and one (Tales of Hemingway for Cello and Orchestra with the incomparable Zuill Bailey) a world premiere, alongside standard repertoire by Beethoven and Stravinsky. On Sunday, Music City Baroque presented their 10th Anniversary Season Finale with a performance of the Vivaldi Gloria at St. George’s Episcopal Church, and West End United Methodist Church presented a performance of A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms featuring their Chancel Choir under the direction of Matthew Phelps, with Margy Bredemann, soprano, and Jonathan Carle, baritone. Both of Sunday’s concerts were free.
Meet The Recorder
1996 (click images to enlarge)
This is the first in a series of occasional posts about the recorder, its historical and contemporary repertoire, its champions, and its place in music education.
Being a recorder player has been a humbling experience. The recorder is not highly regarded in American musical culture, and most people who know of the instrument only know it because they were given a cheap plastic recorder in elementary school and learned to play a few simple tunes on it in a classroom setting. Occasionally I meet someone who is familiar with it from its occasional use by folk music groups or recognizes the instrument from the opening of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (or perhaps I’ve Seen All Good People by Yes). Most people – including many classical musicians I have met, and many elementary school music teachers who actually teach recorder to their music classes – are unaware of or uninformed about the recorder’s long history, or of its beautiful if modest historical repertoire that includes works written specifically for recorder by masters including J.S. Bach, Händel, and Vivaldi, or of it’s employment in virtuosic avant-garde compositions since the 1960s.
Our Friend Sebastian
Anna Magdalena Bach’s autograph of Menuet in G, 1725
Today is the 330th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Like so many of us, I first encountered his music as a child. I don’t actually remember the first time I heard it – it might have been at church, it might have been in a piano lesson. I am pretty certain that the first piece that I became aware of and associated with his name was Menuet in G. It was only years later that I learned that scholars actually now believe this piece was written by Christian Petzold (1677-1733), but no matter. Sebastian is still credited as the composer in most piano books one will encounter, and if it was good enough for his children…
Walter Bitner 
