Alex Chambers: If you've spent time in classical music circles, you've heard this discussion. It's about whether classical music is about to give up the ghost. Thing is, people have been asking that question for decades, at least. Orli Shaham is a classical pianist, who performs around the world and teaches at Juilliard. She's not worried.
Orli Shaham: As a species we look for meaning. We want to understand something that is beyond us or that speaks to our emotions in ways we can articulate. All we need is, we need a key.
Alex Chambers: This week, we've got WFIU's Music Director, Aaron Cain talking with Orli Shaham about helping people find their way toward classical music. Music students' internalized pressure to get all the notes right. And how cassette tapes made music precious in a way, that's maybe been lost in the days of streaming? That's coming up after this.
Alex Chambers: Aaron Cain, Music Director. [LAUGHS]
Aaron Cain: And Alex Chambers, Producer extraordinaire.
Alex Chambers: You interviewed Orli Shaham recently?
Aaron Cain: I did.
Alex Chambers: Tell me why you wanted to interview her?
Aaron Cain: Well, I'm fortunate to get to speak to any musician, ever, of course. And Orli Shaham is a consummate musician, she is a wonderful interpreter of Mozart, she is also an educator at the Juilliard School. But I think one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to her in particular and was quite fortunate to get a chance to, was she thinks a lot about where music is and where it's going and who listens to it and who should listen to it and how do you get people interested in it. It just seems to me that an art form is something that is always irrelevant until you experience it and then it becomes completely relevant, no matter when it's from and art forms always change and the audiences for art forms change and support for the different art forms changes too.
Aaron Cain: And so when you look at something like quote, unquote, classical music, something that people have strong feelings about how it must never change or it must absolutely change, I thought that she was a really good person to talk to because she walks that talk of how to get young children interested in it, how much does something need to be immutable and part of the venerated classic cannon and how much does it need to be fleet of foot and grow and change and she thinks that moment to moment it's clear in all of her work as a musician and as an educator. So, I really wanted to talk to her.
Alex Chambers: Well, I think this is great, is there anything else you wanna say or should we just listen to the interview?
Aaron Cain: Let's hear it.
Alex Chambers: Okay. Here we go.
Orli Shaham: Let me know if you need to hear what I had for breakfast.
Aaron Cain: [LAUGHS] That's the time honored question, isn't it?
Orli Shaham: I am an old radio hand at this point.
Aaron Cain: I'm about to say you are no stranger, you are a well practiced.
Aaron Cain: Thank you so much for joining me today, Orli Shaham.
Orli Shaham: It is my pleasure to be here.
Aaron Cain: The biographies of many of history's great musicians and composers tend to have a lot in common, at least a few sentences in common and one of them might be very much at home in your biography. It would probably begin something like, "She was born into a musical family..." I think it's probably an understatement in your case.
Orli Shaham: Actually I don't know, I was born into a family of scientists. My parents were both scientists, my mother still is, she's a practicing human cytogeneticist and my oldest brother is a molecular biochemist. But I do have a brother who is a violinist and we certainly had music as part of our family always. It wasn't the family business, but it was something that was in the air all the time. And both my parents, even though they were scientists, they had also played instruments and they huge music lovers. One of my favorite sort of family lore stories is when they were young, newly weds, you know, in the 1960s in Jerusalem, my father used to bring home flowers every Friday night, you know, and then at some point he realized, you know, "We're academics, we don't have a lot of money, these flowers only lasts until maybe Tuesday at best, [LAUGHS] what if instead we bought a record every Friday?" and so they would go out and buy LPs and by the time I was born, we had a collection of about 300 records and I got to play around with them and listen to them. It was a huge part of my musical development.
Aaron Cain: What are some of the hits from those 300 or so, that you recall? The ones that you kept going back to?
Orli Shaham: You know, there was a recording of the Prokofiev Classical Symphony that I remember vividly, just wearing out and then Alexander Nevsky's Suite and of course, you know, so many, it was such a big collection that we really went through a lot. But that, I remember that cover and I remember sort of learning to pull out the LP right and getting the needle on without scratching the record [LAUGHS] and all those little details.
Aaron Cain: Talking about musical memories is always really fascinating, especially with accomplished musicians and not that I want to turn this into a format evaluation, but what about cassette tapes? Now for me, when I was a kid, the cassette tape was the beginning of my musical autonomy where my family's taste for music sort of got to become my own taste in music. But was there a cassette transition in your musical life?
Orli Shaham: Absolutely and you know, first of all, it was afford-ability, right, it was around when I was beginning to get an allowance or whatever and I could actually buy them. I think the very first one I bought was probably the soundtrack to Star Wars. [LAUGHS]
Aaron Cain: See, that was on the LP for me, I already had that one. The big, gorgeous opening one.
Orli Shaham: Nice, nice.
Aaron Cain: Oh, so many memories.
Orli Shaham: But one of my favorite memories of the cassette, you know, we had a little portable player and I remember my brother, Gill, experimenting with, you know, you could record over but still keep some of the older material. So I remember him experimenting with doing some fugues, where he would play the one voice but then record over the other voice and you would get a kind of a whistle-y sound of the original on the cassette because it wasn't fully erasing over in the way that-- you know, all these little games that of course, they were playing at earcon, this is what they were doing in experimental music, but we were just doing that in our house. [LAUGHS]
Aaron Cain: Wow. A total cassette hack.
Orli Shaham: And let me tell you the other secret cassette story and this is a shout out to WQXR in New York, you know, they had their program listings printed in I think it was the newspaper, I mean I think we would get the program and we would record the things we wanted to hear, right, so we would set up and listen off the radio to get-- you know, these days you just punch in a couple of letters and you immediately get a video or an audio version of any recording you can ever imagine, but in those days, they were hard to come by and going to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which I did quite regularly to get recordings, you know, that was an outing, I had to make a trip and then you would go there and sometimes whatever you were looking for was out for the next three weeks, but if WQXR had it on air, [LAUGHS] we could record it.
Aaron Cain: This gives us an opportunity to talk about something that I definitely wanted to touch on anyway which is how consumption of music, enjoyment of music and creation of music has changed over the years, where we were and where we are and what you were talking about just then, I had similar experiences when I was a kid, I would be waiting on a hair trigger to start recording the thing I wanted to record of of the radio, part of my musical autonomy. But that sense of ownership, that sense of a cherished thing that you had to basically go out and hunt and bring back to your cave effectively and then it was yours and it became a big, important part of your psychological makeup. I would love it if you would talk a bit about how that might have changed for you over the years and of course, we're getting to where we are now, where everything is available and so is everything as special?
Orli Shaham: Yeah, I think it's harder to find, you know, those special things, I see it with my own kids, they certainly, they find recordings and they latch onto them for sure and then they will listen to those recordings over and over and over again if they love them. But I think there was a different connection to it when it was the one you could get of that piece, right and you know, you were interested in Mahler Four, you could get One, you couldn't just go and compare Ten [LAUGHS] and figure out what you wanted to do from that and it's certainly a major change and it's that whole question of taste making, I've been thinking about it a lot in the context of somebody that I've been quite obsessed with for a few years which is Clara Schumann and you know, in many ways she was one of the big taste makers of her generation.
Orli Shaham: So, you're talking about cassettes and maybe even CDs later, whatever and now the internet where you can just find things wherever you wanted. You know, in her case, it had to do with concert curation, it had to do with what piece would she bring to a certain city and at what time and how did that therefore establish the taste of what people were listening to then? So it's a continuum this question and doesn't only start with recordings, it starts the minute you have music that is available publicly, so not just for aristocrats, right, the minute you get out of the end of the 1700s and music starts to have a public of three people who choose to go to a performance through money that they have somehow acquired, then that's where that question begins and I've been really delving into her role through the 19th century, through her own programs, the things she put together, the things she gave to her students to study and because she performed for 60 years, you could see the changes in her own taste, the way that she is presenting things to the public from one place to the next, it's a single person guiding that.
Orli Shaham: We certainly don't have that today, right, today it's much more, it's all out there and maybe you're following somebody who suggests things for you or maybe you're just out there searching on your own, it's both harder and more wonderful, all at the same time.
Aaron Cain: And yet there's something that we have today in common with those days, with the days of Clara Schumann and I think it's something you and Clara Schumann also have in common which is the importance of the performer or the interpreter because you could argue that Clara Schumann hasn't gotten her due, she could argue she's getting her due more now, you could argue that's still not nearly enough considering how much she did. I mean she in many ways created Johannes Brahms...
Orli Shaham: Not to mention Robert Schumann.
Aaron Cain: Yeah, Robert Schumann, yeah, the star closer to home and what she also went through when she was also a parent and dealing with so many things and organizing the logistics anyway. There are people today who can name Clara Schumann fortunately, but they probably can't name very many impresarios, they probably can't name very many people who were supporting and bankrolling and were patrons of the arts, who were also important, but they remember the performer curator and this is something that seems to me, that you have in common with Clara Schumann, it takes that extra step of someone commissioning a piece, someone performing a piece, the fire of the performer to close the deal.
Orli Shaham: You know, the one major drawback of the availability of all these recordings online is that it's easy to forget the importance of the live event and it is actually truly easy because you have incredible things at your fingertips, you know, you wanna listen to Art Tatum playing Tea For Two, no problem, [LAUGHS] you don't have to go anywhere or whatever it is that interests you and it's very easy to therefore think that that's all of it and you know, you go to a performance, a live performance and it's real, there's maybe the seatings not comfortable, maybe the person next to you is coughing, maybe the hall is too cold, you know, that reality you think takes away from the experience, whereas in fact, this communal experience of being in a live space, having everybody share the listening at the same time and the way musicians play, when they play for an audience within their space which is not the same way they play in a recording, not to mention the whole acoustic thing that happens with your ears and with the halls and with the real instruments vibrating around you, which we're not even close to recreating, even with the best stereo systems. You know, that element is really missing and it's very easy to be fooled into thinking that that element is not important, but it's actually quintessential.
Alex Chambers: Alright, let's take a break, you're listening to Inner States, when we come back, music director Aaron Cain asks Orli Shaham what the difference is for her as a pianist between live performances and studio recordings. Stay with us.
Alex Chambers: Welcome back to Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers. Let's get back to Aaron Cain's interview with pianist, Orli Shaham.
Aaron Cain: You've made many, many recordings. You've also performed all over the world in many of these acoustical spaces for many, many people. I'd love to hear you talk more about the differences; the one that's much harder than the other for you between recording for posterity, and living up to the unrepeatable ephemeral moment of a live performance.
Orli Shaham: Totally different experiences for me. I try very hard to capture the essence of what it means to be live when I am recording, but I don't have to try at all to capture that essence when I'm playing live. Over the years, you develop a sense of where the zone is and how you get there. You go out on stage and you get there, and you do these things, and there's an experimental nature to it. Something I talk with my students about at lot, there's a real sense of living in the present and the immediate future, to the point I'm talking nanoseconds, where your entire being is focused right now and on the next thing, the very next thing, and that's it. That is where so much of your attention is in a completely different way when you in a live performance. That is what that zone is. It is the fullness of I know what I'm about to play, I can hear and react to what's already ringing in the hall.
Orli Shaham: Of course, I've thought about all those other things, but I am living in the present moment. It is zen to the utmost extent. When you are recording, there is so much more that goes into that. When I'm recording, I try to do big long takes of entire movements, or sometimes entire pieces, so that it feels like a live performance. So I capture a lot of that feedback loop of here's what I'm hearing, here's what I'm reacting to in the moment. Of course, there's also, as you said, the question of note perfection, or whatever that is, which I completely let go of in concert, where you might be trying to capture a certain thing or you go back into the booth, you listen, and you think, "Oh, I had hoped that that voice was coming out more but it's actually not coming out quite as much as I thought", and you're trying to get that exact representation of what's in your mind out onto the instrument, and onto that canvas. It's both a more focused thing in certain ways, to do the recording, but also I do feel like you're not living in the present in that same way.
Orli Shaham: There is an ever so slight distance between you and what's actually happening, which is why I always end recording due both at the beginning and at the end I do a performance take where I really try to capture that life feeling, and then you turn on this other part of you ear. Is this exactly the voicing that I want for posterity on this particular moment?
Aaron Cain: So there's Orli the performer, and Orli the producer. You essentially become different people.
Orli Shaham: There's a little bit of that, yes.
Aaron Cain: Now when I found out that you were going to be coming to the Bloomington campus, the first thing that popped into my head was, "Gosh, I hope I get a chance to talk with her about music education."
Aaron Cain: And you've just touched on something that, for me, is an aspect of music education that I find really fascinating which is this notion of being completely present in a moment but not to the exclusion of the very next moment. You don't want to take your brain out and leave it on the keyboards several pages forward or several pages back from where you are. That is a catastrophe. There are many philosophical disciplines. There are religions. There are sports that all deal with some version of this state, this flow state. I'm really curious to know where you are finding students right now, because you have been a pianist from a very young age and this could have been a therapeutic thing for you psychologically from a very young age and I'm wondering where are you finding students on this continuum, and their ability to think that way? How do you see it working on the psychologically? Do they have trouble with it? Does it come easily to them?
Orli Shaham: I think, like anything else, it depends on the student and everything else in their lives. I think students often under value just how important everything but the piano is in their pianistic life. I also think there's a lot of pressure on students today. There's this idea that they should be playing note perfect all the time, because that's how studio recordings are. That is just not how performance works. If the majority of your internal attention is on making sure you don't miss, then that attention has been taken away from an interpretative question. I also tell my students that I don't care if you miss a note, I do care if you miss the interpretation, or if you miss the meaning. I think there is more pressure on them today to do that than there was in my day. Even in my day, growing up, still quite a lot of recordings were single takes. They weren't really edited. Everything today is so heavily edited that you get a completely nonsensical notion of what it means to play all of the notes in a particular piece of music.
Orli Shaham: I come back again to Clara and Brahms. One of the things that Clara hated about Brahms's playing, especially when he was younger, is that he was apparently very messy. He missed a lot of notes. He was not a clean pianist, he didn't like to practice all that much but in terms of the meaning, in terms of the passion, and the shaping of the phrases, that was all there and you see it in her letters to him where she says, "You're doing great but can you slow down and practice this passage a little more?" You think well what's more important? Is it more important to have gotten exactly every note in the right place, or is it more important to have conveyed the deepest meaning within the music?" I love this one quote by Wynton Marsalis where he says, "You can't play perfect, but you can play with perfect intention." I think that is deep and meaningful, and so important for us to remember.
Aaron Cain: Let's see if we can go a step further into territory that might be a little bit more uncomfortable and difficult to tease apart which is that a student can be too hung up on technical things and wanting to get the technique right - and different music teachers have opinions about this - what about the notion of the right interpretation.
Orli Shaham: Yes, a big question. A big can of worms. Is there a right interpretation? For sure, there are wrong interpretations. No question. If you are not doing what the composer set on the page, then it's wrong. It's just wrong. I think a great piece of music has way more than one way of getting it right. There are ways of looking at those markings. Just to back track a little, I find that one of the things that is often missing from students' interpretations is logic. It's just basic logic. They would never let themselves get away with that if they were talking with you, but because they're so occupied with the notes and the physicality of playing - the physicality of playing is a big hindrance towards translating what's in their brain to what's out on their fingers - logic often just goes out the window. So they will say, "Well, it says slur here" and they do slur, but there's no part of them that has thought, "Well why slur?" Why are these two notes tied, but the other two notes that are the same pitches that come right after are not."
Orli Shaham: Why would the composer have gone to the trouble of making the difference between those two statements? It's basic logic. It's basic story telling narrative logic. Once you step back and you see it, it's so obvious. Of course, this one has more emphasis but the reality is you could probably come up with two or three different good, logical explanations for why it's a certain way. They could be equally valid. If you make a convincing, logical argument for your interpretation and the source of it is from the page, it's from the markings that the composer gave, there's a really good chance that the composer would be thrilled with your interpretation even if it's not the same as somebody else's.
Aaron Cain: Zooming out and seeing the historical context, the cultural context, the artistic context in which music was born, how are you finding your students in this day and age, today? How are you finding them taking to that notion?
Orli Shaham: I wish I could come to you and say students are completely aware of everything around their art. But honestly, I find that that is a major issue. Maybe it's the physicality of playing. Maybe it's that pressure of being as fast as whatever the faster recording is or as loud as, I think students don't spend enough of their time thinking about context. I think a lot of it comes from this, that it's not a fear of failure but a fear of lack of perfection. It's a fear of imperfection. This feeling that I have to get it right, and I have to focus all my attention on getting it right because here are all these other people who are getting it right. You don't allow yourself the freedom to maybe get it wrong for a while, while you're also picking up a zillion other pieces of information from other things that are around it. So, by the time you get it right, it's going to be so right and so much more right than it ever could have been if you'd just focused on that.
Aaron Cain: This makes me think weirdly, I don't know why this popped into my head, but this makes me think of Shakespeare where it seems almost like it's folly to try to get something right and make that your goal because it's not like you're going to get Hamlet right. Everyone has seen Hamlet, everyone brings what they bring to it. They want to see a specific person perform Hamlet.
Orli Shaham: Yes.
Aaron Cain: They don't want to see the rightest Hamlet, and music seems to be similar in that regard where should the focus be being righter than the rightest person? No. It should probably be bringing the most context, bringing something to it that no one else can.
Orli Shaham: Exactly. This is what interpretation is and, of course, there's the flip side. There are the ones where we see this all the time, the students who "interpret" for the sake of interpreting. "Oh, I'm going to take time here because nobody else takes time here."
Aaron Cain: Because everyone does.
Orli Shaham: Yes.
Aaron Cain: The National Anthem approach of let's drawer this out as much as we possibly can.
Orli Shaham: Exactly. Again, it loses the internal logic, so they're doing it for a reason that is outside the mechanism, the functioning, the skeleton. I talk a lot with my students about the skeleton, the underpinnings of the music. What's the structure, the fundamental structure underneath all of these notes, that is the thing that is holding this together? I live in New York and we're forever building buildings. It's going to be a great city once we finish it.
Aaron Cain: One of these days.
Orli Shaham: So, you're always seeing in New York buildings where it's just the beams. All you're seeing are the ceiling beams, the various wall beams, the things that are holding the building together but there's no walls yet, there's no actual plaster or anything that creates closed spaces. It's that aspect of the music, or of Hamlet, that is so important to understand. What are the underlying mechanisms that make this whole together? That tell this story? Therefore, what is on top of that? How can I interpret that? A very easy example of that, to hear in music, is something like ornamentation in Mozart. If you understand what the underlying important landmark points are, it's very easy to know where to ornament and where not to because you know what the spots are that you have to hit. What are the crucial elements of the story without which the logic doesn't flow.
Orli Shaham: That is our role. Our role is to understand the composer's intentions as best as we can and then to take the audience by the hand and say, "Here is the emotional journey I would like you to go on for this work. If you know what the underpinning structure is, it's so much easier.
Aaron Cain: Once again, here's one of those things that speaks to all the other skills one needs to have, to have a musical skill, which is something that perhaps is not as wildly understood as it should be, if I may be allowed to opine briefly, because you're talking about extrapolation. You're talking about rhetorical structure awareness. You're talking about knowing about the history, looking at what Mozart did and saying, "Well if he did that there then...", and knowing what sentences need a highlighter pen and what don't. There's so many skills being brought to bear. It's not just are they musical. That term doesn't seem to cover it.
Orli Shaham: That is the difficulty. You hit the nail right on the head because many people are musical, many people have a natural talent for music. I think that you can cultivate any of those people with natural talents to become great interpreters. I do. I think all the rest of it is learnable, but I think you have to want to learn it. It's easy to go on a free ride of, "Hey, I'm pretty musical. This will sound good." Yes, my poor students. You're probably getting a taste of what I put them through.
Alex Chambers: Let's take a break. This is Inner States. We're listening to a conversation music director Aaron Cain had with pianist Orli Shaham about the state of classical music. When we come back, Aaron has a big question to ask. Stick around.
Alex Chambers: Welcome back to Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers. We're listening to a conversation WFIU's music director Aaron Cain had with pianist Orli Shaham. Along with being a concert pianist, Shaham is on the faculty at Juilliard and she also does all kinds of outreach to help people, young and old, connect with classical music. Aaron described his next question as a scary one.
Aaron Cain: Which I promise to ask you in a way that is very hot-button and poorly thought out, which is, is music in trouble now, in this historical moment?
Orli Shaham: My answer is, Absolutely not. First of all, music has been "in trouble" my entire life...
Aaron Cain: But it has been in trouble for hundreds of years too.
Orli Shaham: And my life has been longer than I'd like to share at the moment. [LAUGHS] Absolutely not. I think certain statistics speak to that. The market share of classical music has always been, like, two-point-something percent, and it's still that. So, yes, that's a really small percentage of the world, but that has not changed. The kind of music that we're talking about, which involves repeated listening and layers and depth and a knowledge on the part of the listener of other things, even if they aren't necessarily musically trained, but that they're able to come and look. It is like somebody whose able to go to the museum and say, Oh that brush stroke is not the same as that other brush stroke. That's all it takes, is that little ability to be able to say, Something here is different. That adds so many layers of richness for the receiver of the art, and I don't think that has changed in our lives.
Orli Shaham: For me, the biggest concern is that, in certain places in the world, classical music is very, very popular, but for what I would say, are not the right reasons. That it's popular for similar reasons to why maybe a perfect gymnastics routine is popular.It becomes a kind of exercise of facility and technical ability, but the artistry side, the rhythmic gymnastic side, [LAUGHS] is not valued in the way that it should be. That would be something that I'm more worried about than the idea that somehow we would lose the art form altogether. I think the people who seek out these art forms, and I'm very much an optimist, I believe in people. I think most people, given half a chance, will seek out deeper art forms at some point in their lives, given some entry way into them. I really do.
Orli Shaham: As a species, we look for meaning, we want to understand something that is beyond us, or that speaks to our emotions in ways we can't articulate. All we need is a key. First of all we need to be told where the door is and then we need a key, and those two things happen for different people at different times and stages in their lives, and at different ages. There are times in life when we're just too busy and too overwhelmed, and we may know it's there. This is one of the reasons that I originally had started my concert series for young people, for sort of pre-school and early elementary, called Orli's Bach Yard, which I was doing for a very, very long time. Coincidentally, at exactly the ages that my kids would have been the people in the audience. So, there was a little bit of a selfish thing to it, but the concept was, and still is, is that all the people that I know who have music as a really important part of their lives, whether they're actually musicians or just people who somehow interact with music on a regular basis, they all were exposed to it before the age of six, in one way or another.
Orli Shaham: They had some acoustic instrument in their lives. They had somebody making live music in front of them, and they were able to connect. So, I think that's where we can help make sure that this never dies. That enough people have access to that early enough, and honestly, I'm not expecting that then those people continue with music for the rest of their lives. I don't expect them to learn an instrument, I don't expect them to start going to concerts. But if they've had that connection at that age, then when that moment comes, and maybe it's when they're 55 and the second kid has left for college and they suddenly have three free evenings a week and a little bit of disposable income, then they say, You know what? I used to like music. Why don't I try this.
Orli Shaham: I am really okay with that. I think that's really fine. Everybody needs to come to it at the time that's right for them. I just want to be able to open that door and to say to people, Look, this is here for you.
Aaron Cain: I'd love it if we can talk a little bit more about Orli's Bach Yard, because I know that you put together that program for children, but also for their parents. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how you set about to put something together. You said you had done it very much based on what your sons were going through musically at the time, and they were the perfect age. How do you go from there to creating something that essentially attracts both parent and child alike?
Orli Shaham: Well, you know, my philosophy with it was always, I never talk down to the kids. It's all about including them and having them participate. Who enjoys watching basketball games? It's people who have dribbled a basketball and tried to shoot one into a hoop once. Right? So, it's exactly the same thing with music. Who enjoys going to musical concerts? It's somebody who has tried to play an instrument, even if just for a few minutes and even if very poorly. Just to have some sense of what it takes to be able to do that. So, my philosophy with the kids was always to get them to feel like they're participants. Like it's something that they can have some ownership of. I am not a fan and was never one of those parents who talked down to the kids. I like to bring people along with me wherever I am, and so I very naturally did that with the kids. Then I realized, as we were doing it, that this also meant that the adults were equally entertained, which is great because it also meant I was equally entertained by what we were doing.
Orli Shaham: My secret plan became, as we went along, that all parents, most of whom had young kids and zero disposal time on their hands at that time. I would always make sure that we had real performances of real music as part of our concerts. My hope was that; and of course their kids had been primed so they were calm enough that they could listen, they didn't just have to be dealing with the kids. They could listen while the kids were engaged in whatever they were engaged in. That they would say to themselves, Oh you know what? That's kind of nice. You know, maybe next date night [LAUGHS] we should go hear a concert.
Aaron Cain: Okay. So, a term that I feel a certain kind of way about, and you might too, is measure-able outcomes. I would love to hear if you have anything to share about the sorts of things that the parents who come to these programs, to Orli's Bach Yard, with their children, what they're telling you about what this program has done for them and for the kids.
Orli Shaham: Well, I mean, we had great success with the program, especially pre-COVID when it was very regular. We ran it for long enough that we had kids who, five-six years after they were our audience, started to be our volunteers. We had a lot of kids who then asked to take up instruments after coming to the programs. Especially ones who were subscribers, who would come for a full year and get to see all the different instruments in different ways. The parents just loved being able to share that with them. It's interesting, you said the words "measure-able outcome." One thing that I never, ever was interested in as a measure-able outcome is that the kids would come out of there and the next day remember the word "pizzicato" and be able to talk about song form or you know, I'm trying to think, like the kinds of things that we would teach them, or remember the rhythms to Steve Reich's Clapping Music. That's a lovely bonus and wonderful if it worked out for someone, but that was not at all the outcome that I was looking for. The outcome that I was looking for was much more long term. The outcome that I was looking for was that they would say, Oh, there's that thing. It was delicious. You know, I want more of that. That's it. It's a very simple formula [LAUGHS].
Orli Shaham: The outcome that I was looking for was that they would say, Oh, there's that thing. It was delicious. You know, I want more of that. That's it. It's a very simple formula [LAUGHS]. Sure, this has been one of my favorite things that I've done for the past 16 years I've been the curator of the Chamber Music series of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, California and we call it Café Ludwig. It's a lovely series, both formal and informal. It's on a real stage in a real hall but the audience all sits in little tables where they have, like, little finger pastries that they can eat. Silent, there's no utensils...
Aaron Cain: Important.
Orli Shaham: There's nothing that makes noise, yes. But I also do a lot of talking in that series, and I introduce pieces and concepts of programming. Over the years the audience and I have developed a trusting relationship, so that I can bring them things that maybe they didn't think they wanted, or that they would be interested in. But we can get there together. You know, I will lead them there, both with words and descriptions, and also maybe with the setup of which piece I put beforehand or along with a piece that might be a little bit of a harder listen, in order to help enhance their listening. I used that term a lot, "Enhancing the audiences listening." It's funny, I had never thought of it exactly in those terms, but now that you say it, I have many favorite Clara stories. One of my favorite stories is her writing to Robert and saying, I'm going to the city next week to perform. These pieces are too hard for that city, I will only play these four. I'm forgetting, I think it was Carnaval, maybe it was actually Davidsbundler intense. Anyway [LAUGHS] it's one of them.
Orli Shaham: Next time I go to that city, then I can play the complete, and they will be able to understand it. If I bring them the complete right away, they won't like your music. In many ways that story illustrates just what an impact she had on making is career, because he was quite different than anybody else who was writing at the time, and he was a hard sell for a lot of audiences. She was so strategic about, Okay, the people here are going to get those, and the people there are ready for these other ones, and then eventually we can work them up to understanding the complete piece.
Aaron Cain: What you've just described sounds like the answer to my next question. Here's the question. For success in a musical art form, is it about knowing your audience or about making your audience?
Orli Shaham: Yes, both, absolutely. You have to know where the starting place is. This is true for teaching too. You have to "meet people where they're at," as the phrase goes. Then, through that, you have to understand, How far can I get them in the amount of time we have together? That's what you do, and you figure that out. You know, sometimes you over-pitch [LAUGHS] sometimes you under-pitch, but that's the nice thing about what we do. You can't change a program at the last minute, but there are aspects of things that are tweak-able in the moment. For example, I may prepare a program for a particular place, but what I say about that program in the moment has to do with what I have understood about the collective sense of where that audience is at that moment. So, I could play the same program five different times but speak differently about it to each of those five audiences.
Aaron Cain: So, where do we go from here then? What do you see for the future of this, because you're getting apples off of the tree with Orli's Bach Yard. You are able to go into a community and get to a point where you can put some very sophisticated programming in front of them. We've got "Ligerty," we've got the "Belfast Hail Storm," the training wheels are off at this point. So I think you have definitely succeeded. They let you take risks, they trust you now. So what's next? What are your hopes and dreams moving forward, both as the performer and the curator?
Orli Shaham: We just keep moving in whatever direction the wind seems to take us. I think commissioning pieces and having living composers be a regular part of the interaction is crucial. I don't know how we got off of that in the 20th Century. My major in college a Columbia was 20th Century European history, so maybe I'm biased from all of the horrors that I've read about and sort of delved into over the years, but I think the world got to a place where we said everything we did was wrong, let's take that away. One of the results there and there a zillion more elements into what went on in classical music, which we won't get into now. What ended up happening was that we sort of got to this place where the old music was considered so important, so valuable and so treasured, and new music wasn't even considered as relevant.
Orli Shaham: Nobody even was curious about what was happening at the moment. What are peoples current reactions to the world? That was wrong, it was emotionally unhealthy, it was artistically wrong to not actually interact with your own time. And I think we went through period of that, you know, your and my growing up years, where a lot of the pieces that were being presented audiences hated, and that ended the story, right? We tolerated our vegetables when we had to. I think we're in a much healthier place now, I think now there are actual reactions, composers are being allowed to express the moment in a way that they weren't, you know, a lot of those pieces that people hated in the 80s, frankly, they were pieces that could have been written in the 50s, they were just still being written that way and we just hadn't moved on.
Orli Shaham: I do feel we're in an emotionally better place industry wide with composition in that way. I also think sometimes people worry, Oh but these pieces, they're not so great, what do we do? They're not as good as the other ones. That's part of the mix, part of how it goes. It has always been that way. You know, when Clara played the music of Thalberg.Everybody thought this was the greatest thing. [LAUGHS] It didn't last. You know, a couple of the pieces are really worth it, most of them are not. That's a normal part of it, but the healthy thing is that he wrote them, that she played them, that other people listened to them, that they got their due. At the same times there's the flip side. There are the small pieces that sort of lost their place in the Cannon but absolutely belong there.
Orli Shaham: A perfect example is, tonight I will be playing with Norman Krieger. We are playing four of the pieces from Robert Schumann's forehand piece, Bilder aus Osten, and these are stunning gems of piano pieces. They're just gorgeous and I've been talking to a whole bunch of pianists as I've been preparing them. Not one of us has ever played them before. They're known, we know they exist, they're part of the sort of general knowledge, but they're not a regular part of the Cannon that we play today. So you also have that flip side, the pieces that got lost, but that really deserve their moment in the continued cannon. I have another piece. I've been doing a lot lately that falls into that category, which is the Amanda Maier violin sonata. She was a Swedish violinist, maybe next generation after Brahms, like 13 years younger than he was, something like that.
Orli Shaham: Although she was part of that whole circle, and through Clara she knew Brahms and they all connected, played together and supported each other. She was a hugely popular virtuoso violinist. She played all over Europe and she was also a wonderful pianist. She's got a number of fabulous Chamber works, but the violin and piano sonata in particular, I find just a perfect masterpiece of a romantic sonata. If I had to describe it I would say there's like Mendelssohn and Dvorak and Robert Schumann all in one, somehow in this piece, and it's beautifully balanced and really well written for both instruments. She clearly was gifted at both instruments. It's such a good piece. When she sent it to Brahms he was so delighted with it that he wrote to her what a great piece it was, and in return he sent her his "D Minor Violin Sonata," which is his third. He sent it to her, knowing full well that, who would she read it with but Clara?
Orli Shaham: And so she and Clara read this sonata together, Because she was a woman and she didn't write a whole lot of other music and so therefore we don't know her as well, for whatever reasons it's not played as much, and we can bring that back now. I think this idea that the Cannon is set in stone is so false. The Cannon needs to be a living, breathing transitioning thing, and that includes living composers. That includes the additional voicers of people who are writing right now and commenting on the music of the past; as all of the great composers always did, they commented on the music of that past. They are also commenting on our present moment and on what they see around them, and I actually think we're in a very healthy moment with that right now.
Aaron Cain: Well, Orli Shaham, thank you for breathing life into this music, for helping to keep it alive. Thank you for coming to Bloomington to share it with us and thank you for speaking with me today.
Orli Shaham: Oh, my absolute pleasure, thank you so much.
Alex Chambers: That was WFIU's music director and host of "Morning Music" Aaron Cain in conversation with pianist, Orli Shaham. And that is our show for today. You've been listening to Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. If you have a story for us, or you've got some sound we should hear, let us know at WFIU.org/innerstates. Okay, I've got you a quick moment of slow radio coming up. But first, the credits. Inner states is produced and edited by me Alex Chambers, with Avi Forest. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar and we have additional music from Orli Shaham herself. Alright time for some found sound
Alex Chambers: That was Indiana University grad workers on strike in April, 2024. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks, as always, for listening.
