Talk:Music

Three Maestros Talk Music
Conductors are known for their long lives—Toscanini, for example, lived to be 89. Three Harvard conductors—James Yannatos, Tom Everett, and Jameson Marvin—have also enjoyed professional longevity, waving arms and batons in Cambridge for 38, 31, and 24 years respectively. Yannatos, senior lecturer on music, conducts the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. Everett directs the Harvard University Band, along with its associated ensembles and jazz program. Marvin conducts the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the coeducational Collegium Musicum. Added together, they've been making music in Cambridge for nearly a century—working with and shaping the lives of thousands of student performers—and are still going strong.
As musicians, the three have contrasting backgrounds: Yannatos began as a violinist, Marvin sang tenor, and Everett has had a long and varied career as a bass trombonist. And each conductor has his own approach to the auditory adventure. In the following conversations, the three maestros, who also compose and/or arrange scores, share their views on music and how to make it.

James Yannatos

I grew up in the South Bronx. My father was Greek, my mother American, and her parents were English and Austrian. No one else in my family was musical, but my father used to put on the radio Saturday afternoons for the Metropolitan Opera. He had some Caruso records. My first love, at five years old, was a violin in a shop window. I told my mother, "I want that," and pestered her for three years until she bought it. I'd get up at six in the morning to practice violin so I could play baseball after school. I was a pitcher—another kind of conductor.

As a boy soprano, I sang in High Episcopal churches in New York. It paid! As a violinist I was concertmaster at Music and Art High School, but I was not very interested in a solo career. Conducting and composing were more attractive. I started writing violin pieces when I was 11.
I'm a violinist and I play lousy piano and monkey around with brass and winds. As a composer, if I want to use an instrument in a way that's going to be problematical for the performer, it's for a damned good reason. A professional orchestra will have maybe two or three rehearsals when they look at a new piece; if it is extremely difficult to play, it makes it that much harder to get the piece performed. That's a fact of life.

Composing music helps me as a conductor—it gives me a kind of insider's view of structural issues, orchestral issues. You want to conduct from a creative, or re-creative, position, rather than from a mechanical viewing of the work.

Instruments are an extension of the voice. If something doesn't sing, doesn't breathe, it's not real, not human. It has to be connected to our physical beings, to how we live. That's what makes people "musical"—the way they phrase. I tell the strings to think of the bow as their lungs—they have to breathe with their arms. Listen to the woodwinds—their phrasing comes directly from the breath.

There's the surface reality and then the hidden reality, the magic part of it. When the notes you've written are sounded by the instruments themselves, what they produce in terms of overtones and combination tones makes the whole picture more complex. Even a C-major chord, depending on what instruments play it—an oboe, a flute—sounds completely different. There's an acoustical magic that goes beyond what's visible in the score.

In performance, the acoustical aspect is essential. If the Bach Society does a piece in Paine Hall and the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra does the same piece in Sanders, there's got to be a difference. One group has 40 musicians, the other has 100—more bodies, more friction. There's no absolute!

There's a certain rhythm to preparing a work for a concert. We first read a new piece through, with lots of mistakes—you can't stop for each one. Then you look for broad structure, the movement of the larger sections. Next we go into more specific things like balance problems—melody versus harmony. You have to tune it, and make sure you don't overwhelm the predominant voice. I try to transfer all this through gestures, which stand as physical metaphors for the sounds the composers meant. In a way it's like dance: you must find gestures that communicate.

I'm frightened about the absence of music, and the cutback of music, in schools. And what music is done, is so dumbed down. There's so little contact with the classical tradition; everything is programmed to sell pop stuff. Kids are not developing one of their senses. They're hearing their pop stuff with big earphones —which, after a few years, make them deaf. It's dumbing down something that could be a tremendous spiritual source, opening up so many things in their lives.
There are dedicated teachers, though, who, in spite of the difficulties, engage their students in musical activities that are life-enhancing. There's this film, Music of the Heart, in which Meryl Streep plays Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras, who started string programs in Harlem schools. I think of myself, coming from the Bronx, and think of these underprivileged kids studying fiddle. Most of them trashing it at first, and then really getting into it, and having their whole family get excited as they see what it's done for the kid. School grades begin to come up, behavior problems disappear, and 80 to 90 percent of these kids go to college. To me, this is what ought to be happening. Music gives you another perspective, another way of viewing life. Especially given the world in which we live—it's not a luxury, it's absolutely bread and butter.

"If something doesn't sing, doesn't breathe, it's not real, not human."