David Wolfson Music

I saw (again) recently the contention that true mastery of any subject area is conferred simply by spending huge amounts of time on it. (I had first encountered it in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.) In order to become a world class [insert occupation or vocation here], one must spend at least 10,000 hours practicing. If you’re not world class at what you do, it’s because you haven’t spent enough time practicing.

As it happens, I believe this is probably correct, as far as it goes. It doesn’t say much, though, about how one comes by the drive to spend that much time working on something. It also doesn’t address the quality of the time spent practicing. You get good at what you practice: if you practice doing something badly, you get really, really good at doing that thing badly. I spent a great deal of time practicing the piano when I was a kid; I probably had put in close to 4,000 of those hours by the time I graduated from high school. But I was far from even on the way to world-class, because I was playing badly, and practicing badly. I learned how to practice, and for that matter how to play, several years into a professional career in which it was my stock-in-trade. I may be on my way to those 10,000 hours at this point, but my total is far less than the number of hours I’ve spent in front of a piano.

I don’t know what I’ve spent 10,000 hours of my life doing, other than sleeping (and I can’t claim to be really good at that some days). Playing piano? Almost certainly. Practicing piano? Almost certainly not. Composing? Hmm… doubt it, unless you count the time doing something else while the subconscious mind works on it (click here for a thread on New Music Box Chatter in which I commented about this). “Making Music” in general—certainly, if you count all of the various manifestations (playing, practicing, rehearsing, conducting, composing, arranging, copying, listening). And yet I wonder whether I would make the grade as a “world-class talent” in any of those areas, except possibly composing (there are a few of my pieces that I’m very proud of, like this one). I do take comfort in the recent findings that those who question their own competence (again, in any area) are generally more competent than those who don’t.

“You get good at what you practice” is a line I first heard from Experience Bryon, the director of Experience Vocal Dance Company, in regard to the mental habits which inhibit performance. Procrastinating and obsessing; these are things I’ve certainly put in close to the requisite time on. Speaking of which, I should probably get back to working on the soprano-and-string-orchestra setting of Peter Beagle’s Deep Woods. That only seems as though it’s taking ten thousand hours…

This week I’m a Maestro, and I’m a little bemused by the fact.

I’ve always made a good chunk of my living as a music director for musical theatre productions. Typically, they’ve been small, Off-Broadway productions and regional shows, as well as summer stock. But every now and then I wander into something different—such as the show I’m currently workshopping with Family Opera Initiative. It’s called Cat, it’s a 45-minute into-the-schools spin-off of their evening-length piece Animal Tales. Both pieces are by Kitty Brazelton, whose work I adore.

This is my third show with only the second opera company I’ve ever worked with—and I’m a Maestro. (The first  was when I was a last-minute replacement for a production of Working at Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee, long, long ago. I was very young then, and I hope I can be forgiven.) Suddenly my voice carries more weight in the room than it usually does; I’m in some ways the primary interpreter of the piece in a manner that simply doesn’t happen in a theatre production.

However, it is not going to my head. For one thing, this is a hybrid piece, which is being billed as an “opera musical.” The extremely talented cast are all musical theatre folk, which means that none of them has ever sung anything remotely like this music, so that even two weeks into the process my job is just as much “No, that entrance is on an F, which you get from the third note of the piano part two bars earlier. Hear it?” as it is being a primary interpreter. Also, I’m wearing tails. You’d think that’d be exactly the thing for a Maestro—until you realize that one of them’s a zebra tail, one’s a lion’s tail, and one looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.

Also, despite the fact that I’m accompanying the opera on piano, I’ve been asked to bring my Maestro Stick for a scene in which I admonish singers who have Been Bad, and another in which I encourage the audience to make noise. I thought it was called a “baton,” but I’m a stranger in the world of opera. I guess that’s just what it’s called in the world of musical theatre.

I’ve been thinking about Paul Woodiel’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about how the producers of the current revival of West Side Story are planning to cut half the string section and replace it with a synthesizer. The thrust of his piece is that Leonard Bernstein wouldn’t have approved.

Hard to argue with that. I’ve worked a great deal as a keyboard player in Broadway pits, and it often involves being “the rest of of the string section;” occasionally it involves being all of the string section. Sometimes the synthesizer programming—and the orchestrator’s writing for keyboard strings—is really quite good, and as a player I’ve been able to fool myself into believing I was sounding just like a string section. Other times—more often—my only hope has been that the sound engineer had the keyboard mixed so low that no one would notice what I was playing.

The whole notion of a reduced orchestra seems to come up on Broadway (or the West End) more than anywhere else. You rarely see a ballet or opera company reorchestrating the standard rep; they tend to perform with piano or a recording instead. There’s also the horrifying phenomenon of the “virtual orchestra,” which thank goodness you don’t hear so much about these days. But on Broadway, most revivals have smaller orchestras than the original versions of their shows, which is purely an economic decision, made possible by synthesizers. Sometimes the new orchestrations sound good; often they fall short.

Paul has made an eloquent case for the need to respect original orchestrations, and I won’t go over the same ground. But I do have one relevant story to tell:

Back in the early 80s, when keyboard synthesizers first came out, I was present when David Gooding, at the time the music director of the Cleveland Playhouse (whom I was assisting), gave a friend a tour of his studio, which feature the Fairlight. This was a pretty high end piece of gear for the era, and as David put it through its paces the visitor commented,”Isn’t this going to put a lot of musicians out of work?” David’s response was, “Well, it’s not going to put me out of work”—which I understood “I’m a musician too, and I’m moving with the times,” rather than being a callous dismissal of all of his colleagues. He then mentioned that the invention of the pipe organ had put a lot of string players out of work, back in the day.

Twenty five years later, even though I’m one of those who plays synthesizers, there’s a lot less playing work for me because they exist. Everyone has gotten used to the sound of music made with smaller forces. Broadway orchestras are, as often as not, small bands led by the conductor at the keyboard. With the decrease in union minimums for theatre orchestras, the brief vogue for orchestras that included three keyboard parts seems to have passed.

But I’m managing; there’s still plenty for a composer/arranger/music director to do. It’s just that I’m working on a piece for string orchestra and soprano right now, so I want there to be a lot of working string players!