October 1, 2024
Wrestling the Dream Down
Reflections on the Composer-Conductor Bond
by Thomas May
by Thomas May
Just a year after Gustav Mahler took over the reins at the Vienna Opera in 1897, his contemporary Arturo Toscanini (seven years younger) arrived at the helm of La Scala. Toscanini would in time become the prototype of the conductor as culture hero, known around the world simply as “Maestro.” This is the model still dominating the classical music scene. And it encapsulates a shift in emphasis toward the performer. Mahler’s dual role as composer and conductor is highly emblematic. He stands at the crossroads, representing a holistic approach that is considered rare in our era of increased specialization.
Yet, rare as it has become, the Doppelgänger identity of composer and conductor does persist. Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams, and Esa-Pekka Salonen are three leading figures in classical music today whose identities embrace the roles of both composer and conductor. Their insights give us a contemporary perspective on music making as a process of continually unfolding revelation.
Of course, Mahler exemplifies a long-standing tradition of musical multi-tasking that was integral to Western classical music’s development. Well before the arrival of the specialist conductor, it fell to the Kapellmeister, or musical director, not only to coordinate performances but to provide a steady supply of fresh music. J.S. Bach’s duties at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche made him the equivalent of a one-man music factory as he composed new cantatas for weekly liturgies, prepared the choir and instrumentalists, all the while maintaining a high profile as one of Europe’s master organists. When Haydn was hired as musical master of ceremonies for Prince Esterhazy’s estate, the job meant writing fresh music as well as performing it.
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Yet, rare as it has become, the Doppelgänger identity of composer and conductor does persist. Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams, and Esa-Pekka Salonen are three leading figures in classical music today whose identities embrace the roles of both composer and conductor. Their insights give us a contemporary perspective on music making as a process of continually unfolding revelation.
Of course, Mahler exemplifies a long-standing tradition of musical multi-tasking that was integral to Western classical music’s development. Well before the arrival of the specialist conductor, it fell to the Kapellmeister, or musical director, not only to coordinate performances but to provide a steady supply of fresh music. J.S. Bach’s duties at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche made him the equivalent of a one-man music factory as he composed new cantatas for weekly liturgies, prepared the choir and instrumentalists, all the while maintaining a high profile as one of Europe’s master organists. When Haydn was hired as musical master of ceremonies for Prince Esterhazy’s estate, the job meant writing fresh music as well as performing it.
Story continues below...
The progressive division of labor and specialization that followed have proved relentless. But, as Esa-Pekka Salonen observed, it’s “not just a musical phenomenon. It’s happening in every field, from manufacturing to medicine.” Referring to computer networks, he said, “most systems are becoming so complex that even the most intelligent individual can only grasp a fraction of a system’s totality.”
Michael Tilson Thomas has described a mirror-like process that binds the composer and the conductor. From his perspective, to compose begins with the impulse to express a personal take “on a certain experience or quality of living. The musical gestures that result define a sort of dreamscape.” But however spontaneous that initial impulse, an effort of will is required to give it shape. Composing “isn’t only about having the dream,” MTT continued. “It’s about wrestling the dream down into a form so others can know it. Wrestling it down means being willing to go through a difficult process—while keeping the music still a dream. Sometimes the wrestling is to envision the musical idea for a particular person or performer.”
Conducting, said MTT, involves the reverse process: working back from the notes in a score to the dream that those notes attempt to wrestle down. The conductor who also composes has an advantage in being more closely attuned to this process. “That’s what Mahler as a performer was trying to do,” MTT continued. “The score is really a kind of codebook. Making the music itself come alive is a kind of sacred thing for me. You look at these little dots and dashes Mahler put on the paper, you begin to play them, and it’s as if the spirit comes off the page and envelops us and somehow draws us together as one spirit.”
When it comes to interpreting his own music, John Adams said that “after conducting a piece many times, as for example I have done with my Violin Concerto or with Harmonielehre or Nixon in China, I actually refine my views on the music. Frequently I'll go back to the original score and minutely alter things like dynamics and tempi.” This echoes the pattern we find in Mahler. To take just one fascinating example of his constant tweaking of scores, his request for a five-minute pause following the cataclysm of the Second Symphony’s opening movement was a bold and unprecedented strategy. After numerous times conducting the work, however, Mahler felt confident to leave the instruction in place.
But Adams observed that experience as a composer can sharpen the intuitive understanding a conductor brings to another composer’s work: “There are things that composers do that are similar to the craft of painting. For example, how you prepare a background, or how you accomplish shading or chiaroscuro, or how you produce an effect of a vanishing point. All of these are matters of technical skill coupled with inspired imagination. What draws me to a composer like Sibelius, for example, is the way he produces these effects. I know what he's going for because I have struggled with the same issue. So in rehearsing the piece, I focus on bringing out what I believe he was attempting.”
Clearly, we lose a certain interpretive richness in the separation of identities into composer versus conductor. This division of labor results from a complicated mix of factors. Much of the division has happened for purely practical reasons. Salonen, for example, recalled that “I never had any plan for an international conducting career,” hoping instead to devote himself wholeheartedly to composition. But when he was called on to conduct a Mahler symphony (ironically enough) on short notice in the 1980s, his conducting career was launched. “It took me completely by surprise.”
Without the slightest hint of nostalgia for the past, Salonen pointed out that “the volume of classical music is vastly bigger than it was 50 years ago. The number of musical events per second has increased, so there’s more demand than ever for conductors. Pierre Boulez once said that if someone shows any talent for conducting, they’ll be immediately sucked into the international machinery for conducting.”
Still another possible pressure that split composers and conductors is a central tenet of modernist aesthetics: the need to be original. Thus, a certain anxiety may have discouraged composers from the podium. Assuming they would be accused of having been influenced by the past, they may have avoided the constant rapprochement with standard repertory that is essential to a conductor’s role. “The idea of total and utter originality—that every new piece has to be a tabula rasa—is a recent one, a postulate of postwar modernism,” Salonen explained. “I don’t think the human mind works like that. Creativity is about reacting: As in a chemical process, new substances are born. The old and honorable way is the one composers have been following for centuries. If there’s something you like, lift it and modify it to your purposes. The most creative people create new substances that are very unexpected.”
Both Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen have noted their formative experiences with avant-garde trends as young musicians and how this impacted their identities as composers. In his 1994 book Viva Voce, MTT described how his involvement with improvising and performing experimental music eclipsed his desire to compose: “The sort of music that I really want to write,” he felt early on, wasn’t “like anything I [was] playing.” He concluded that “the music I want[ed] to write [was] more like my father’s music. It’s melodies, it’s songs, it’s theater music.” In 1989, MTT reached a turning point by composing his From the Diary of Anne Frank: “It was an opportunity for me to return to writing the sort of music that I might have done just at the point where I left off composition.” The result was “to cause me to take my writing seriously, to care about it, and to care about wanting to have people hear what was going on inside my head.”
In his composing, MTT has found that his work as an interpreter leads to insights about communicating with his audience through his own music. Salonen, on the other hand, recognized that being unexpectedly thrust into the limelight as a conductor allowed him to evade the artistic crisis he needed to face as a composer. “Instead of suffering the crisis as a composer, I suffered it as a conductor.” But the heart of the crisis echoes what Michael Tilson Thomas also experienced. Wheareas MTT did not want to write the kind of European avant-garde music he was conducting, Salonen “realized that the music I was composing [as a young avant-gardist] and the music I loved to perform didn’t sound the same.” After a decade or so of losing himself on the podium, he had an epiphany that opened up his inspiration to compose seriously again: “It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up one morning and felt I was free from the rules of my training as a composer. I realized that the [tenets of the postwar European avant-garde] were not my truth. One of nice things about getting older is that one tends to become a little more liberal in aesthetic judgment; one knows there is more than one truth.” The breakthrough that followed was Salonen’s acclaimed large-scale work for orchestra, L.A. Variations.
The composer-conductor bond can also have its natural rhythm. “Composing is obviously a very personal, introverted activity,” Adams offered. “I tend to become extremely habitual in my daily life when I am home writing and can probably seem rather ungregarious and hermetic to my neighbors. Conducting is completely the opposite: it's very ‘other-oriented,’ very much about dealing with other people's personalities and emotions, and it involves quick, strategic decisions. If I didn't have the continual experience of performing, I strongly suspect that my creative life would atrophy in some way. But the two activities, taken together, form a wholeness that feeds my imagination. For me, the hardest thing is the transition—having to go from the solitude of my studio to the busy, frenetic activity of preparing and performing a week of concerts with a large symphony orchestra. But once I've made the adjustment, I find I'm equally happy to be reunited with my other, more sociable self.”
In the early 20th century, as many of the trends reflected here were just beginning to run their course, the phenomenal musical personality Ferruccio Busoni published a visionary manifesto called Outline for a New Aesthetic of Music. Busoni’s concept of musical truth combines a kind of Platonic idealism with a pluralistic breadth very much in keeping with today’s musical pulse. “The performance of a work is also a transcription,” declared Busoni. “Whatever liberties it may take, it can never annihilate the original.” Indeed, his description of the act of capturing musical thoughts and preserving them in a score shares a fascinating resemblance to Michael Tilson Thomas’s image of “wrestling the dream down.” Said Busoni: “Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea.” Busoni warned against puritans who treat the score as “a rigidity of signs.” The creative act is fluid and requires a transaction between composer and performer: “What the composer’s inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own.” If the composer-conductor bond has reinforced one truth, it is this: that, for the dream ultimately to be wrestled down, the audience too must become part of the collaboration. A conductor helps translate the composer’s codebook. Those who listen complete the translation.
Thomas May is a contributing writer for the San Francisco Symphony’s program book. He blogs at memeteria.com.
Michael Tilson Thomas has described a mirror-like process that binds the composer and the conductor. From his perspective, to compose begins with the impulse to express a personal take “on a certain experience or quality of living. The musical gestures that result define a sort of dreamscape.” But however spontaneous that initial impulse, an effort of will is required to give it shape. Composing “isn’t only about having the dream,” MTT continued. “It’s about wrestling the dream down into a form so others can know it. Wrestling it down means being willing to go through a difficult process—while keeping the music still a dream. Sometimes the wrestling is to envision the musical idea for a particular person or performer.”
Conducting, said MTT, involves the reverse process: working back from the notes in a score to the dream that those notes attempt to wrestle down. The conductor who also composes has an advantage in being more closely attuned to this process. “That’s what Mahler as a performer was trying to do,” MTT continued. “The score is really a kind of codebook. Making the music itself come alive is a kind of sacred thing for me. You look at these little dots and dashes Mahler put on the paper, you begin to play them, and it’s as if the spirit comes off the page and envelops us and somehow draws us together as one spirit.”
When it comes to interpreting his own music, John Adams said that “after conducting a piece many times, as for example I have done with my Violin Concerto or with Harmonielehre or Nixon in China, I actually refine my views on the music. Frequently I'll go back to the original score and minutely alter things like dynamics and tempi.” This echoes the pattern we find in Mahler. To take just one fascinating example of his constant tweaking of scores, his request for a five-minute pause following the cataclysm of the Second Symphony’s opening movement was a bold and unprecedented strategy. After numerous times conducting the work, however, Mahler felt confident to leave the instruction in place.
But Adams observed that experience as a composer can sharpen the intuitive understanding a conductor brings to another composer’s work: “There are things that composers do that are similar to the craft of painting. For example, how you prepare a background, or how you accomplish shading or chiaroscuro, or how you produce an effect of a vanishing point. All of these are matters of technical skill coupled with inspired imagination. What draws me to a composer like Sibelius, for example, is the way he produces these effects. I know what he's going for because I have struggled with the same issue. So in rehearsing the piece, I focus on bringing out what I believe he was attempting.”
Clearly, we lose a certain interpretive richness in the separation of identities into composer versus conductor. This division of labor results from a complicated mix of factors. Much of the division has happened for purely practical reasons. Salonen, for example, recalled that “I never had any plan for an international conducting career,” hoping instead to devote himself wholeheartedly to composition. But when he was called on to conduct a Mahler symphony (ironically enough) on short notice in the 1980s, his conducting career was launched. “It took me completely by surprise.”
Without the slightest hint of nostalgia for the past, Salonen pointed out that “the volume of classical music is vastly bigger than it was 50 years ago. The number of musical events per second has increased, so there’s more demand than ever for conductors. Pierre Boulez once said that if someone shows any talent for conducting, they’ll be immediately sucked into the international machinery for conducting.”
Still another possible pressure that split composers and conductors is a central tenet of modernist aesthetics: the need to be original. Thus, a certain anxiety may have discouraged composers from the podium. Assuming they would be accused of having been influenced by the past, they may have avoided the constant rapprochement with standard repertory that is essential to a conductor’s role. “The idea of total and utter originality—that every new piece has to be a tabula rasa—is a recent one, a postulate of postwar modernism,” Salonen explained. “I don’t think the human mind works like that. Creativity is about reacting: As in a chemical process, new substances are born. The old and honorable way is the one composers have been following for centuries. If there’s something you like, lift it and modify it to your purposes. The most creative people create new substances that are very unexpected.”
Both Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen have noted their formative experiences with avant-garde trends as young musicians and how this impacted their identities as composers. In his 1994 book Viva Voce, MTT described how his involvement with improvising and performing experimental music eclipsed his desire to compose: “The sort of music that I really want to write,” he felt early on, wasn’t “like anything I [was] playing.” He concluded that “the music I want[ed] to write [was] more like my father’s music. It’s melodies, it’s songs, it’s theater music.” In 1989, MTT reached a turning point by composing his From the Diary of Anne Frank: “It was an opportunity for me to return to writing the sort of music that I might have done just at the point where I left off composition.” The result was “to cause me to take my writing seriously, to care about it, and to care about wanting to have people hear what was going on inside my head.”
In his composing, MTT has found that his work as an interpreter leads to insights about communicating with his audience through his own music. Salonen, on the other hand, recognized that being unexpectedly thrust into the limelight as a conductor allowed him to evade the artistic crisis he needed to face as a composer. “Instead of suffering the crisis as a composer, I suffered it as a conductor.” But the heart of the crisis echoes what Michael Tilson Thomas also experienced. Wheareas MTT did not want to write the kind of European avant-garde music he was conducting, Salonen “realized that the music I was composing [as a young avant-gardist] and the music I loved to perform didn’t sound the same.” After a decade or so of losing himself on the podium, he had an epiphany that opened up his inspiration to compose seriously again: “It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up one morning and felt I was free from the rules of my training as a composer. I realized that the [tenets of the postwar European avant-garde] were not my truth. One of nice things about getting older is that one tends to become a little more liberal in aesthetic judgment; one knows there is more than one truth.” The breakthrough that followed was Salonen’s acclaimed large-scale work for orchestra, L.A. Variations.
The composer-conductor bond can also have its natural rhythm. “Composing is obviously a very personal, introverted activity,” Adams offered. “I tend to become extremely habitual in my daily life when I am home writing and can probably seem rather ungregarious and hermetic to my neighbors. Conducting is completely the opposite: it's very ‘other-oriented,’ very much about dealing with other people's personalities and emotions, and it involves quick, strategic decisions. If I didn't have the continual experience of performing, I strongly suspect that my creative life would atrophy in some way. But the two activities, taken together, form a wholeness that feeds my imagination. For me, the hardest thing is the transition—having to go from the solitude of my studio to the busy, frenetic activity of preparing and performing a week of concerts with a large symphony orchestra. But once I've made the adjustment, I find I'm equally happy to be reunited with my other, more sociable self.”
In the early 20th century, as many of the trends reflected here were just beginning to run their course, the phenomenal musical personality Ferruccio Busoni published a visionary manifesto called Outline for a New Aesthetic of Music. Busoni’s concept of musical truth combines a kind of Platonic idealism with a pluralistic breadth very much in keeping with today’s musical pulse. “The performance of a work is also a transcription,” declared Busoni. “Whatever liberties it may take, it can never annihilate the original.” Indeed, his description of the act of capturing musical thoughts and preserving them in a score shares a fascinating resemblance to Michael Tilson Thomas’s image of “wrestling the dream down.” Said Busoni: “Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea.” Busoni warned against puritans who treat the score as “a rigidity of signs.” The creative act is fluid and requires a transaction between composer and performer: “What the composer’s inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own.” If the composer-conductor bond has reinforced one truth, it is this: that, for the dream ultimately to be wrestled down, the audience too must become part of the collaboration. A conductor helps translate the composer’s codebook. Those who listen complete the translation.
Thomas May is a contributing writer for the San Francisco Symphony’s program book. He blogs at memeteria.com.
