Orchestra as Game

Orchestra as Game

Team Members

Amy K. Nichols
Evan S. Tobias
William Cheng
Punya Mishra

Illustrated by Shachi Kale

Heart of the City

By Amy K. Nichols

1. Allegro

Of all the things in life, nothing felt so true, so sure as the violin in his hands. A relic now, more than a century old. Certified Italian by Averna, circa 1925. Ari knew its weight, its curves, its character. To him, it was an anchor, steady and unchanging. In his many years exploring its limitations, he’d only ever succeeded in finding his own. 

Looking out over the city, he rested it again at the curve of his neck and drew the bow across the strings. Long tones at first, low and slow, pulling forth the richness, the resonance, feeling the sound move through the wood and horsehair to his muscle and bone. He would miss this, his pre-concert ritual. The pacing. The worrying over problem passages. The meditative gazing out his capsule window. Of course he would still play—so long as sinew and synapse allowed—but after tonight, everything would change. The season would end, the hall would be repurposed, and he would fade as his mentor had, to obscurity and eventual rest. That was the way, was it not? Times, like movements, change. The old must make way for the new, for better or for worse.

The lights in the capsule flickered and Ari pursed his lips. Another brownout? He’d spent the morning in the dark; his building was one of several chosen today for sacrifice to preserve an overburdened grid. He stepped closer to the window to peer down at the world in miniature below, watching for signs of outage as his fingers moved up the neck to play into the midrange, drawing forth the familiar arpeggio pattern, each note ticking up in speed. He watched an incoming SkyLift glide past the high-rise buildings, its body bright against the smoky haze hanging over the suburbs. Weightless, it made its slow descent toward the airport, eventually moving out of view. If it made any sound, he didn’t hear it. His violin filled every inch of the ten-by-ten room, drowning out any noise from beyond the walls. Not that noise ever reached him on the twenty-first floor. Only the evening marches rose strong enough to permeate the concrete tower, and even those created a kind of rhythm and music of their own. For Ari, music was everything. It was his all in all. 

The lights flickered a second time and Ari felt a dull ache behind his right eye. He turned away from the window, closed his eyes tight and pushed himself deeper into his routine, tapping his foot in time with the arpeggios, then just ahead of the time and just ahead again, pushing the tempo up and up. Opening his eyes, he watched his fingers race the pattern over and over, each note landing with perfection, his pinky incrementing up the E string just as his mentor had trained him all those many years ago. He imagined his teacher’s finger tapping the beat on his shoulder as he played, the old man’s voice thick with the simple command—again—each time Ari reached the end. You get what you give, he’d say, finger wagging. Is that all you have? Through him Ari had learned to push himself, to will himself past the pain to the breaking point, to the breakthrough point. This time he would make it. This time he would play as though to raise the old man from beyond. Faster and faster his fingers moved, becoming a blur and that blur sparking… light? He blinked and the spot disappeared. A trick of the eye. Next came the familiar cramp, the stab of pain. Gritting his teeth, he continued to push until two tones sounded in his Lynk and his BioNet spoke: “Sudden increase in cortisol detected. Stress reduction protocol initiated.”

 The bow slid from the strings as his right hand dropped to his side. Heart racing, Ari held up the left, his chin still holding in place the violin. Staying as still as possible, he waited and watched until—there—the tremor. He crumpled the offending hand into a fist, then shook it out. The upgrade had failed and the patches the developers had installed were ineffective. His software was old, his operating system out of sync, and the power fluctuations seemed to make the situation worse. Sighing, he set the violin down and massaged his hands, trying his best to hold his thoughts still, to keep the question at bay: if not for music, what did he have? He mused over the timing of his performance, the last of the night. He would play, bow, and fade into the wings. 

The sun by now had broken through the haze and burned fire-orange in the west-facing windows. Time ticked down to the inevitable. He tapped his Lynk to call for the CitEV and waited for the system to respond. Nothing. Called for light in his capsule, but the room stayed dim. Another outage. His wasn’t the only system falling behind. 

Symphony Hall wasn’t far, he reminded himself as he returned the violin to its case. And a walk might do him good. 

2. Andante

Stepping from the portico, Ari remembered why he preferred life on the twenty-first floor. Outside, the afternoon blazed hot and the Augment chatter crashed into him like a wave. He’d forgotten how bad it could be during rush hour, and his glitched Lynk upgrade didn’t help. Of late, he’d been seeing and hearing things he couldn’t explain. Random things, out of context and beyond his control. Now, images crowded his vision and voices spoke into his mind, triggered by the nearby businesses and market stalls. Easy takeaway options! Value for your credits! Just for you! While supplies last! Don’t miss out! Where had all these people come from? He couldn’t tell which were real and which were virtually imposed. Tapping his right temple twice, he lowered the promotional onslaught to minimum but there was no way to opt out. 

Violin case in left hand, hangered jacket in right, he pressed forward down the block, waving away each augmented-reality assault as best as he could while humming “Suuri Valtameri” to drown out the unwelcome noise. Years ago he’d heard the piece performed in Seattle. There he’d seen the actual suuri valtameri, the great ocean. He’d hired a car and driven as far north and west as he could go. Then he’d stood at the edge of the world and watched the roiling blue until fog finally carried the night to shore. That seemed a lifetime ago, before the world had turned to fire. 

Heading south on Central Avenue, he walked in time with the melody rising and falling in his mind, his thoughts conjuring the memory of the ocean’s breeze. Soon the sun would sink below the skyline and the temperature would relent, at least a little. The more the heat radiated from the ground, the walls, the sky, the harder he reached for that ocean sweetness, but it all was for naught. Suuri valtameri. How ridiculous, to think he could overcome the heat with the power of his mind. Phoenix might be big, but it was the very opposite of water. 

Phoenix. Named for the mythological bird rising from ashes, and aptly so. As the sweltering heat and decades-long drought consumed its desert verges, rendering the exurbs and suburbs nigh-uninhabitable, Phoenix grew upward. A landscape of construction cranes pushed the high-rise towers ever higher to shelter those fleeing the devastated outskirts. Once upon a time, vehicles far outnumbered pedestrians in these downtown corridors, but now the streets teemed with people, a hodgepodge tapestry of color and culture and sound. As he navigated the melee, his translator caught snatches of conversation. Sometimes the words brought with them images, as if Ari could see momentarily through another’s eyes. That wasn’t possible, though, he reminded himself. Just the upgrade glitch interacting with an old man’s imagination. Still, it happened ever more frequently as he continued down Central. Each time it left him feeling something he had no name for. He tried to swallow it down, push it away, this thing he was feeling, but that only caused it to burrow in his belly and gnaw at him from the inside. Something wasn’t right.

He stopped at the corner of Central and Fillmore Street, across from the old Post Office with its Spanish Colonial Revival design, and waited for the speedrail to complete its stop. The same sunlight that glinted flares off of the train’s glass and chrome cast more tender shadows around the old building’s umber tiles and plaster scrollwork. Built during the Great Depression, the Post Office had witnessed decades of civic, climate, economic, and architectural change. And yet it remained. 

An automated voice instructed passengers to board the train and watch for doors. Ari set the violin case down, whispering an apology to his beloved instrument, and stretched his hand. He wished he could lay his coat down as well, but that was no way to treat a tuxedo. He glanced at those around him, their eyes seeing things not there, hands touching things that didn’t exist. Surely they felt the gnawing, too. Surely they heard it whispering in the backs of their heads and behind their eyelids. Or was it only him? Suddenly, he felt very aware of his clothes, his hair, his stature. Of the space he occupied on that corner. Of how very different he was. He looked at his shadow, how it splashed across the shadows of others. There but not real. Touching, only not. 

The speedrail chimed and pulled from the station with an electric whir, leaving the rhythm of the city to resume. It didn’t miss a beat, and each of their lives fell in time with its meter. He stood still a moment, watching people moving this way and that. Were their actions their own? The question tempted him to step out of line, out of time, just to see what that might bring. In the end, though, he simply picked up the violin case and continued on his way. 

At Civic Space Park, his Augment chatter dropped off. One of the few designated Quiet Zones in the city. Here all nonessential communications were dampened and people gathered to rest and to be. Some called it home. Rather than bringing peace, though, the lack of noise put Ari’s mind on alert. The park’s signature feature, a tornado-like netted sculpture, loomed above the grass and concrete benches. He stopped humming and took up listening instead, for voices and movement from the makeshift pods lining the park. In some places they stood two and three deep. Metal and cardboard, dissected bins and discarded cubicle walls. Hoods and doors and seats of vehicles long banned and abandoned. Tarps for roofs and blankets for doors. Overturned buckets as tables, as chairs. So rarely did Ari leave his twenty-first floor, so rarely did he walk the city that he’d never looked upon the encampment before. Now that he truly saw it, it amazed him, how it had grown up as if from the ground, a city with the city. 

Motion startled Ari and he stumbled back to see a man with a weathered face, a rat-like dog at his heel. The man spoke and Ari’s auto-translation kicked in. “Greetings, friend.”

“Hello.” Ari said it like a question, for in that moment his eyes had filled with images of the inside of a pod, a meal of scraps shared between himself and the dog. 

“Credits?” The man’s voice pulled Ari back to the street, the park. 

“I—” Ari’s eyes moved to the corners of the buildings, the streetlights, the cameras watching. “No. No credits.” It was a lie. Of course he had credits. 

The man’s temple lit in translation and he squinted hard at Ari, at his clothes, at the violin case. “For sell?” 

“No!” Ari gripped the handle tight. “Not for sale.” He didn’t wait for the translation, didn’t wait for the man’s reaction. He turned and walked—urgently, intentionally—past the park, not stopping until he reached Van Buren Street with its posh corporate offices and high-end restaurants. This felt more familiar. More safe. Still, his legs burned and his BioNet warned, “Elevated heart rate. Fear detected. Respond yes to alert authorities.” 

“No,” he said, breathless. He turned the corner and fell back against a storefront, relieved this time to hear the Augment chatter kick back up. “No authorities.” His left hand trembled as he wiped it across his forehead, his fingers still clutching the hook of the coat hanger. 

The face of a smiling woman flickered in his eyes. “You look like you could use a drink. Follow me to the best hangout in town.”

“No,” he said again, waving his jacket in the air in front of him to dismiss the offer, then leaning his head back against the wall. How foolish he’d been, deviating from his familiar routine. He should’ve stayed on the twenty-first floor, waited for the system reset and called for the CitEV. Now his mind was a mess and his shirt soaked through with sweat. 

He took a breath to regain his composure, to convince his BioNet he was fit to move on. Tapping his temple twice and smoothing out his shirt, he crossed the street, humming as best he could and trying to get his breathing under control. In the distance he heard voices, but couldn’t tell from which direction they came. By the time he’d walked another block, his gait and heart rate had steadied. His thinking, too, and he berated himself for being a fool. The man with the dog hadn’t threatened him. He’d only asked for help. And what harm could he have meant? Wouldn’t Ari have wanted the same, had he been in the man’s situation? 

He considered going back, finding the man with the dog, transferring him credits. But by now the sun had dipped below the skyline and soon would be down altogether. He didn’t have time. And besides, what good would it do? Ari was but one person. There would be others, certainly—people who were better equipped to step in and help. 

Shaking his head, he turned right from Van Buren onto Second Street, passing the manicured grounds and dancing statues of the Herberger Theater, and stopped. The road was filled with people shouting and holding signs. 

People over profit!

Power for the people! 

We will not be silent!

Again he considered turning back, taking the previous street south and cutting over. “Time,” he said. 

Two tones sounded. “The time is 6:58 p.m.”

He would be late as it was. He had no choice. Hugging the violin case, he stepped into the stream of protesters and pointed his feet south to walk with them toward Symphony Hall. 

3. Minuet

The roar of the protest rattled Ari as he walked along the road with them. So different from the distracted pedestrians just a few blocks before. Most of the protesters shouted. Some blew horns. Others banged on garbage-bin lids. They shouted about money, about power, about the rich, about the poor, about the fires, about the brownouts, about the housing crisis and the growing encampments, about fairness, about equality. Ari didn’t disagree, but what good did shouting do? Shouting created noise, but those who could make change lived up so high they couldn’t hear. Suddenly, he felt his age, the weariness that had settled into his bones, the tightness of his formal shoes.

Security drones darted along the edges of the crowd, hovering close then whirring back, cameras on and warnings blaring. Ari had never seen one up close before. He’d always been one for following the rules. He walked with eyes straight ahead, functioning under some animal belief that if he didn’t make eye contact, no one would see him, not even the drones. He couldn’t have blended in, though, if he’d wanted to. Tuxedo pants, dress shoes, cummerbund. Those walking near him had likely never been to a symphony. Probably didn’t even know it existed. Or if they did, didn’t care. 

When the protest reached the blockade at Monroe Street, just north of Symphony Hall, the marching morphed to a crowding about, and the shouting only grew louder, echoing up into the towers of St. Mary’s Basilica. At the top of the old church’s stairs, a news crew surveyed the scene, eyes and cameras panning the crowd that swarmed the street. At first Ari found himself swallowed up in the mass, but then found his way through, moving right toward the southeast corner. A CitEV glided past him, stopping at the barricade, and he caught his own distorted face in its dark windows. Privacy glass. Whoever was inside could look out, but those outside couldn’t see in. Something whooshed past his ear—a bottle—and cracked against the edge of the transport’s roof before bouncing onto the street and rolling under the barricade. Ari staggered to avoid the security drones descending on the scene. A siren sounded as a drone’s camera eye telescoped forth, locking onto someone in the crowd. Ari heard screaming, saw the protestors attempt to disable the drone, knew he needed to run. Clinging tight to the violin case and clutching the tuxedo jacket, he lurched toward the checkpoint where the CitEV had stopped to be searched. As his feet carried him forward, the gnawing unnamed thing in his belly moved up toward his heart, surfacing feelings of panic so strong he thought he might drown. Angry protestor faces and empty pedestrian faces and holographic Augment faces and even his own distorted face swam in his vision and in his brain, swirling him sick and dizzy. Only when the security guard stopped him, made eye contact, asked his name, scanned his Lynk, did Ari feel he could breathe again. He let Ari through with a simple, “Have a nice evening.”

Three steps beyond the checkpoint, Ari entered another world. A world he better understood. Patrons dressed to be seen milled the promenade outside Symphony Hall as CitEV transports delivered others at the curb, all dresses and tuxedos and jewels. Faces smiling, not a care in the world. Not a thought to the protesters and chaos just up the road. As he walked past the hall, he felt his body ease, tension dissolving into the familiar. Through the lobby windows he saw the great glass chandelier shining, welcoming those who belonged. Which wasn’t him exactly. His entrance was around the back. 

At the stage door, he jostled the case and coat to his left arm, reached for the door knob with the right, and stopped. From the shadows a pair of dark eyes watched. Bright eyes. Young eyes. 

“Hello,” Ari said, his hand still on the door knob. 

The owner of the eyes said nothing, only stared. 

“Are you here with your family?”

Again, nothing. 

“Are you lost?”

Ari heard voices on the other side of the door, musicians and staff preparing for the show. He didn’t need to ask the time to know he was more than late. Still, he couldn’t look away from the eyes. Deep as the night beyond the city’s glow. Hanging his jacket on the door knob, he knelt down—his knees protesting—and lay the violin case on the ground. “Would you like to see?” he asked, undoing the clasps. The hinges creaked as he lifted the lid. “This is a violin.” He gazed at the Averna, 117 years old, nestled in padded velvet. Forty-two of those years had been spent with him. He heard the sound of shuffling feet and when he looked up from the violin, a boy had emerged from the shadows. Hair mussed. Face dirty. Completely out of place. 

The boy moved closer to peer over the lid. 

“It’s old, like me,” Ari said. He felt the tremor as he traced the violin’s curves with his finger. “Though it’s doing a lot better than I am,” he said with a small laugh. “It’s dear to me. Like an old friend.” He plucked a string and the boy’s eyes went wide. Ari thought back to the first time he’d heard a violin. He’d never known anything so pure, so true. 

He reached to pull the violin from the case, then changed his mind and closed the lid instead. Standing again, he looked down at the boy. “Would you like to hear more?” Not waiting for the answer, he removed his tuxedo jacket from the hanger, used the hanger to prop open the door, and went inside. 

A breath later, he heard the stage door close behind him. 

4. Finale

Backstage, Ari fell into his regular routine. Greeting other members of the orchestra. Putting on his jacket. Brushing the knees of his trousers—kneeling on the ground was no way to treat a tuxedo. Getting out his violin. Tuning. Running through a quick warm-up. Massaging the muscles of his hands. This time, though, he felt as though he was walking through a dream, as though none of this was real. His last concert. He watched himself go through the motions, not feeling any emotions. 

As he walked with other members through the side stage wings, he thought he saw a pair of bright eyes watching, but when he looked again they were gone. Taking his seat among the first violins, he closed his own eyes and listened. The orchestra warming up had always been one of his favorite moments—the swirling of instruments, the ebb and flow of competing tones and rhythms. He let himself fall into the sound before adding to it his own, playing the long notes as he had in his capsule, running up into the upper registers. The Averna sang, a thing of beauty in his hands, and he let the sound fill his heart and mind. 

The concertmaster walked onto stage, triggering applause. Ari looked again to the wings stage right and left for the boy. Had he really seen him? Where did he go? The oboe played the tuning note for brass and winds, then played the same note for the strings. As Ari checked his already-tuned violin, the lights flickered and surged, growing brighter than usual before fading again. A gasp and silence fell over the hall as orchestra and audience alike waited to see what would happen. Seconds ticked by, but the lights—thank goodness—stayed on. The conductor appeared from the wings, breezing onto the stage with his usual grandeur. Ari rose with the orchestra. The conductor bowed, then turned his back to the audience, raised his baton and gave the orchestra a ready? look. The lights flickered again and the maestro scowled as he gave the downbeat, his eyes trained on the lower strings launching into the mysterious opening lines of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. 

The winds came in, followed by the brass. When the theme built and rose into a thundering rush, the lights surged again. This time Ari felt a pulse of pain in his temples that flared with the cymbals’ crash. His hands faltered and his bow slipped, causing him to play off key. His stand-partner eyed him but Ari focused on the music they’d prepared, continuing through the second thunderous crescendo, the third. Then the symphony calmed into the quieter spell, carried by the winds. When the lights surged a third time, bright enough to blind him, two tones sounded in his ear. 

“System unstable,” his Lynk said. “Rejoining network.” 

The upper strings’ sweet refrain followed and Ari pushed on, his fingers playing what they knew. He shook his head to try to clear his eyes, but two tones sounded again and instead of the auditorium, he saw a family seated at a table, together but apart, eyes and minds focused on their Augments. Quickly Ari double-tapped his Lynk and—not missing a beat—jumped back in to play his next line, even as his eyes caught those of a woman in the audience. The woman whose family he’d just seen. He knew it was her, knew beyond a doubt. The way she looked at him confirmed she knew it, too. 

He shifted to turn away from the audience and closed his eyes. The power surged again and inside his eyelids flashed red. Two tones sounded. “System unstable. Rejoining network.” In his mind Ari saw a bar, a drink in his hand. When Ari’s vision cleared again, the principal bassist’s eyes peered into his. He, too, knew what Ari had seen. 

Double-tapping his temple, he launched into the next refrain, determined to stay on track, but the lights surged and surged and surged, and each time they brought the two tones, the system warning, the flashes of lives that weren’t his own. He saw two feet stepping up onto a high-rise ledge. An encounter with an angry man, his finger inches from the face of a child cowering in fear. Every time Ari’s vision returned, his eyes locked on to the one whose mind he’d just witnessed. And every time they knew. Each and every one knew. 

On it continued, the lights and the power and his mind bouncing from person to person as his bow bounced along the violin’s strings. He didn’t see the conductor’s glare. Didn’t hear the orchestra drop away. Didn’t hear when the hall doors burst open and the protesters charged in. Didn’t hear the ensuing chaos. Didn’t see the maestro leave the stage. He only kept playing, notes not of Mahler’s composing, but something altogether different, altogether new. Standing now, his fingers searched out a translation of what he saw, what he felt. Beautiful things. Unspeakable things. Frightful, terrible, wonderful things. As the violin sang, the thing in his chest bloomed into something fierce, forcing itself out through the tears in Ari’s eyes. Through the chaos, it spoke its name into his mind. 

Loneliness. 

Millions of people living on top of, next to, and inside of each other’s spaces. All connected. And all utterly alone. 

Ari played their song—a song they’d never heard but that they all knew by heart. 

Still playing, he moved to the front of the stage, eyes searching, mind connecting with every yes and yes and yes. One by one, those present moved toward the stage until a great crowd had gathered all round. Even the ushers had left their places, the concession staff, the stage crew. Doors left unattended, those outside streamed into the hall as well, drawn by the spectacle. As Ari continued to craft the song, the air in the auditorium changed. Charged. Quickened with the electricity. His fingers flew across the strings, moving high into the upper ranges, then pulling down low and strong. The song fell apart and formed again with each connection made—from one man to many—and sparks of light lifted from the places where his fingers met the ebony board, the metal strings. The tremors, if there at all, become but another timbre in the greater composition. 

Two tones sounded and Ari turned toward the next source, a boy with bright eyes emerging from the wings, his feet padding on the wooden stage. Ari moved toward him, playing what he saw in the young child’s mind. A song of a great journey, a song of sadness and of loss. A wave of emotion washed over Ari, so great he was sure his old heart would break. This time his Lynk said something new: “System receiving.” 

Ari knelt and the boy peered into his eyes, pressing into his mind images of wonder, of things far better, far greater, far more beautiful than Ari had yet seen. Images not of what had been, but of what might be. A future formed in hope and peace, where every person was known and seen, connected through kindness and purpose and love. The song shifted to translate what he saw and the fierce thing inside him morphed with it, changing and surrendering into a thing of wings and of joy. The air crackled, alive with the energy of the song. A melding of matter and wave. Light spun up from the strings of the relic violin, circling and swirling, forming sparks, then arcs and swoops. Those bands—magenta, yellow, green, white—wove around and around, building on the next and the next, until it became a living, electric thing. Light and life and thought and breath and dream, all fitted together and floating in the center of the hall like a great, beating heart. Energy radiated forth from the form, filling every sliver of space and the lights of the building both inside and out pulsed in time, on and off, on and off. 

Ari let the last note ring, then laid the violin and bow at the boy’s feet. He’d given his all, spent everything he had. Fingers still trailing arcs of light, Ari slipped from the circle, leaving all to gaze up at what together they had created. It was theirs now to care for, together to grow, this wonder, this future, this hope. 

Towards Participatory and Collaborative Orchestras

By Evan S. Tobias

Openings

Orchestras and communities have a curious relationship. Orchestras rehearse and perform music in a linear process, from written music to conductor to orchestra to audience, typically situated in Western European Art Music and cultural norms. While some diversify their repertoires, orchestras typically maintain a unidirectional process of what Thomas Turino calls presentational performance.1 Orchestral musicians sit or stand on a stage, performing music to a group of people who sit quietly, listening to the music. Aside from possibly mingling during an intermission or attending a reception, these listeners leave without interacting with one another or the orchestra. Though musicians and audience members share space and sound, the relationship can feel transactional. Even this minimal level of engagement is only available to those who attend orchestra concerts; the detachment is far greater for the larger community that houses and supports the orchestra. While many orchestra musicians and community members prefer this type of arrangement, imagine if this linear trajectory from composers, to conductors and performers, to listeners was just one of many possible paths orchestras and communities could travel together. What if orchestras were more relational and participatory with their communities?

In the following vignettes and discussion, I invite you to join me in imagining possibilities for orchestras that expand from presentational performance and embody principles such as:

• Embracing participatory paradigms in which people have varied opportunities to engage with music and orchestras over time
• Centering equity and learning
• Collaborating with communities
• Redistributing power for shared input and collective decision-making

Vignette 1: Re-orchestrating Community Engagement

“Do you think they could record that passage with strings only, and then another version with full orchestra?” asked Kim, a music education professor from the nearby university.

Brenda, a trombonist, and Ernesto, a facilitator for the orchestra’s community initiative, looked at each other.

“Sure, I think that’s doable,” Brenda said, nodding.

“What would people do with it?” Ernesto asked.

Gene, a local music teacher, moved two fingers apart on their touchscreen mounted securely to a microphone stand several feet from Brenda and Ernesto, zooming in to the “pre-concert engagement” area of the team’s sprawling digital white board. “Well, there’s a note from Dr. O about describing harmonic choices. So, with two versions of the passage we could get people thinking about orchestration decisions related to the harmonic material happening there.” Jude, a community member, piped in, “I think we’re also having people throughout the community listen to that part and create response videos to share on the project site and in the augmented-reality thing, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Ernesto replied, taking notes to check with the orchestra about whether recordings could be included in the project videos. Sally, another music teacher, added, “We could invite people to create and record their own parts to the string passage. Like, if you were the composer, what would you have created?”

Zara, a junior at a local high school, looked up from her laptop. “Could those get played at the concert?” Brenda made a note. “I’ll check.”

“Could we have a workshop or something, so people who don’t play instruments can participate?” asked Jude.

Ernesto replied, “Kim, maybe we can collab on that?” Kim nodded. “Sure!”

Zara continued, “And what if at the concert before the orchestra performs the whole piece, we ask the audience to guess and vote on which recorded passage is the one that the composer wrote?”

Gene created a new area on the board to organize this latest interactive community-engagement portion of the project. He added Zara’s suggestion and typed: “Next steps: 1) Discuss community-generated music during next participatory workshop 2) high school-community-university workshop to create new parts?”

“What if we invited school orchestras to record the community creations?” Zara continued, gesturing towards Sally.

“We could pair community creators with school orchestras to orchestrate and record the new parts,” added Sally, riffing on Zara’s idea. “Then they could eventually hear each other’s orchestra recordings, the original community recordings, and the actual orchestra performance of the composer’s original version!”

“Dope!” Zara and Gene exclaimed. Jude smiled.

Kim chimed in, “We can definitely support that. I’ll link it into my undergrad class and we can coordinate with you and other folks.” Brenda added, “And I’ll work with my orchestra colleagues to make related videos for technique and phrasing. Maybe some of us can play with the school orchestras if they like.”

“Love it!” Ernesto said as the team shared fist bumps.

Towards Participatory Engagement with Music

The vignette above expands on existing orchestral models of outreach and engagement to invite community collaboration.2 We might consider how resources related to concert music that are already typically presented to audiences and community members—pre-concert lectures, notes about the music, lesson plans—could be designed in ways that are interactive and participatory, both in terms of the process and what people design together.

Collaborative work to design resources and experiences that center equity, learning, musical engagement, and community requires the involvement of community members who represent diverse demographics, life experiences, musical and cultural practices, and worldviews. This means reimagining concerts as one of many points of engagement between orchestras and community members over extended time frames, rather than only during the performance. Expanding the linear trajectory of preparing music to present at a concert could include opportunities for people to engage with music before, during, and after a public performance.

What if orchestral musicians recorded individual parts as stems, or the full orchestra recorded entire passages or pieces and then shared these recordings with the public? What might people do with this music? With much of the music that orchestras perform in the public domain, along with the potential to develop equitable agreements with living composers, orchestras might open the music they perform to creative engagement, perhaps guided by prompts, activities, and projects.3 By assigning Creative Commons licensing4 to such recordings, orchestras could support any number of educational and participatory practices that are prevalent in popular culture, including but not limited to cover versions, arrangements, parodies, multitracked recordings, remixes, sample-based productions, mashups, tutorials, response videos, new versions in different media forms, duets, and play-alongs.5 Perhaps orchestras could work with community members to track, curate, share, and connect these creative endeavors with concerts and other orchestral events, in a manner similar to the websites CCmixter.org or whosampled.com, which catalog people’s use of samples in new musical creations.

Designing with and for participatory engagement and learning invites flexible ways of being with communities. When centering equity and learning, such collaborative and participatory work has potential to foster new positive and equitable relationships.

In addition to collaborating with community members to design and develop participatory experiences related to music performed at concerts, orchestras might create and perform music with communities. The vignette that follows imagines an orchestra opening the linear trajectory of preparing and performing existing music (and related resources) to audiences by embracing participatory music-making.6

Vignette 2: Branching Options

Lee looks up from reviewing branches of options covering the team’s design map as Jaqui, a project facilitator, walks towards the screen, lightly tapping the tabletops in front of people.

“OK everyone,” Jaqui says, “we’re working on the city scene today. Sam’s showing us different ways people might play this part of the game. Last week we agreed that strings and woodwinds would start today.”

Sam, a high school sophomore, starts playing the game. “So if I go this way, I can jump along the roof system like this.” As Sam moves his character, a violinist starts improvising.

Several other musicians pick up on one of the violinist’s figures, working out some interesting harmonies. Lee starts video-recording the ensemble so they can remember these ideas and have content for a “creative process” video they’ll share with the public.

“What happens if you don’t clear a jump to a roof?” asks Victor, a clarinetist. Sam has his character jump, purposely missing the next roof.

Lee creates a new branch on the design map with a question mark for “falling off roof” music. Back above the city, Sam moves to a new part of the game world, avoiding detection by guards who walk below. The strings lock into a progression, trying different harmonies depending on whether Sam moves undetected or is spotted by guards.

“Ooh, I like that,” Jess, a local neo-soul artist/producer, says quietly. Jess presses some pads on their MIDI controller, recording the violins’ material in their DAW, and starts processing the sound, playing with options to layer in. Will, an orchestra violinist, shows Maria, a high school violinist, an option for bowing the roof-scene harmonies. She nods her thanks.

The moderate-sized ensemble includes musicians from the orchestra, local high schools, and the broader community, one of whom hadn’t touched her clarinet since she was a teenager. After collaborating for five weeks, their responsiveness to each other, their varied instrumental proficiency, and their comfort with generating musical responses to the gameplay are all feeling more seamless. The plan is to share their work in progress next week at a pop-up event for community feedback. Then, a month later, they’ll perform interactively with people and live gameplay in a larger outdoor event, followed by a facilitated discussion with the participants and audience.

Towards Participatory Engagement with Orchestras

Orchestras have great success performing video game music with accompanying media, in some cases playing along with live gameplay in front of audiences.7 Along with these traditionally staged performances to audiences, orchestra musicians can also create and perform with community members. In the preceding vignette, musicians from an orchestra, high schools, and the community expand a presentational performance paradigm by collaborating to create and perform adaptive, dynamic music in response to live gameplay.8 Inviting the public to play along with the ensemble at a performance by taking a turn playing the video game or contributing to the music might foster new relationships among orchestras and communities. A participatory paradigm invites us to reimagine taken-for-granted concepts such as “performance,” “concert,” “audience,” and “orchestra” in light of this kind of multimedia collaboration.

We might imagine similar projects in which community members and orchestra musicians collaborate even more expansively by creating games (or other media) and music. A group of young people could design a narrative played through Minecraft, or develop a new game with platforms such as Scratch, Roblox, or Unity, complete with original music created and performed collaboratively with orchestra musicians. Consider future possibilities with immersive media in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), or extended reality (XR).

While video games and immersive media serve as examples here, we might think more broadly about how orchestras can collaborate with people across communities to create music in varied ways. For instance, orchestras could work with community members and experts across a range of fields to share community members’ stories through music, highlight and explore socio-cultural issues that are meaningful to the community, or create soundscapes and aural representations of the community’s past, present, and possible futures.

Vignette 3: Voicing Perspectives

“It needs more intensity,” Lisette quips. An intergenerational group of community members, scientists, orchestra musicians, students, and a middle school music teacher sit together around a few rolling tables, listening to the multimedia piece they are creating. On one wall of the room, a flat screen displays faces of a dozen pre-service music teachers listening in from the local university with their professor, Eli Edelstein. Frankie, an orchestra bass player, nods in agreement, marking his part while Kendra, a junior majoring in music education, adds Lisette’s feedback to the list of topics to track, shared with all collaborators.

“What about the narration?” Mx. Garcia, the music teacher, poses to the group.

“What do you mean?” asks Liam, an eighth-grade violinist, his bow bobbing like a woodpecker on his knee, eager to play. Mx. Garcia skips ahead in the recording until a resonant middle-aged baritone voice floats over the music through wall-mounted speakers. “I don’t know,” Lisette says, adding, “It doesn’t sound authentic.”

“Why not use recordings from the original interviews?” asks Sarah, a percussionist from the orchestra.

All heads swivel over to Nina, one of the university researchers. “We have the permissions, so, if that’s the direction you want to take, we can go back to the recordings.” Nina taps her mobile device, playing an excerpt of a field interview with a long-time resident: “I remember the stations changing over. It was gradual…sort of like how they acclimated us to the driverless cars all those years ago.”

Raina, a community member, cuts in. “I’d like us to be more intentional about balancing the emotions and perspectives here. We have despair and angst about drought and a lot about solar tech and energy transitions, but we’re missing a nuanced representation of people’s resilience or a historical perspective…”

“And perspectives of Indigenous folx,” Merideth, a senior music education major, interjects from the screen.

Charles, a parent of a middle school cellist, exhales, irritation sizzling like lightning through desert air. “It still feels like propaganda. We need other voices here—OK, yes, climate change is real, people are stressed about the Colorado River, dogs can’t walk anywhere cause we can’t have grass anymore,” he gesticulates with exasperation, his voice crescendoing. “I got that, but, we committed to having voices of the community. Voices, not lots of one voice. We’re focusing on energy transition but I don’t hear the perspectives of people losing their jobs or people whose businesses are taking a hit. I mean, are we really trying to bring our community together or are we going to keep cutting out voices that some of us don’t like?” Charles juts his finger onto an invisible mute button in the air for emphasis.

Lisette and peers respond to Charles in a rapid staccato, channeling their communal agreements of how to engage with one another to avoid personal attacks and maintain their collaborative relationship. Ron and Silvia, the project facilitators, chat briefly, whispering at the side of the room. Silvia steps toward the center of the room and says, “OK everyone, I think we’ll host another community sharing session to address some of these issues and move from there. Do we need a moment to re-center, or space to continue this conversation?”

Pedro, one of four orchestral creating consultants, who has been observing silently until now, raises his hand. “Yes, Pedro?” Silvia asks, ready to continue the conversation and facilitate the group in navigating through the tensions. Pedro begins, leaning in a bit, “Either way, we’ll need some time to think through relationships between voices and the sonic space—not just the different perspectives, but the timbre and inflection of the people speaking and the stories and histories that live through their voices in relation to the other sounds and music.”

Almost the entire group nods collectively. Everyone appreciates the contributions that Pedro and the other creating consultants bring to the project, even if they are often reserved in these sessions. Each consultant approaches music-making with a unique worldview and aesthetic, so the participants are always curious about what the Quartet, as they like to call them, would bring to the table.

Back on campus, Eli, the music education professor, finishes jotting the notes he was taking furiously throughout the session, turning to face the students who are still observing the conversation between Pedro and the group through their assortment of laptops and mobile devices. After ensuring that everyone in the small university classroom is muted in the streaming app, Eli mentions that the class will soon debrief and address facilitation skills for working through similar creative tensions and social dynamics as part of their future teaching and collaborative work.

“Let’s connect and chat through all of this before class next Thursday,” Eli texts Ron and Silvia. “Bet,” Ron dashes off a reply, nodding his head towards Eli on the screen.9

Preparing for Participatory Orchestral Futures

The types of collaborative projects described in the three vignettes expand presentational performance to embrace participatory paradigms; initiatives like these might inspire new ways for communities and orchestras to better understand one another and the places they inhabit.10 Committing to participatory collaborative engagement with communities while centering equity and learning calls for sophisticated planning, and requires reimagining the roles and responsibilities of orchestra professionals. This includes ongoing dialogue, developing understanding, and navigating complex discussions, decision-making, and power dynamics—particularly around inequities that pervade our society, including orchestras. This shift in emphasis, from linear transmission to multidirectional exchange, will require orchestras to transform their goals and the taken-for-granted ways that they function as institutions.

Rethinking Seasons

If collaborative creation with communities extends the typical time frames of rehearsing and performing existing music, orchestras might need to reconsider what a “season” means and how programming works. This could mean building in the time needed for collaborative and community-involved decision-making about what an orchestra might do over the course of a year, or over longer durations. What if young people, community members, and educators participated in discussions around the work of orchestras, including projects and initiatives that involve local communities? What if orchestras planned seasons with such deep connection with local communities that schools and other organizations had corresponding projects interwoven with the music and initiatives to support seamless and generative collaboration? How might concerts be reconceptualized to share collaborative works in progress, or to support participatory engagement? What might occur if orchestras reduced the number of presentational performances per season to make time and space for more expansive types of musical engagement with communities? How might these changes factor in the work and lives of orchestra musicians: how their engagement in the orchestra is evaluated, the requirements and expectations built into their employment contracts, and how they are compensated? Orchestras may also need to revisit what it means for musicians to thrive in their organizations, including how to balance musicians’ workloads to support their well-being, feed their creative endeavors, avoid burnout, and preserve sufficient time for learning, practice, rehearsal, and recovery.

Rehearsals and More-Than-Rehearsals

Orchestras could reconsider what constitutes a rehearsal or imagine additional formats of time and space that musicians, staff, administration, and communities share with one another. These could be venues to model power redistribution, collaboration, and shared decision-making during rehearsals, and more broadly across orchestra activities, to embrace participatory and collaborative ways of being.11 For instance, orchestra musicians could contribute to dialogue before, during, or after rehearsals to inform decisions about what music they perform, how they interpret and perform the music as an ensemble, or what and how they rehearse. Collaborative decision-making could also extend to local music educators, young musicians, and community members exploring what if? curiosities and questions as a form of involvement. Imagine young (or older) people working with an orchestra to explore musical questions such as: What if the trumpets played more softly in that spot? What if the basses and violins traded parts? What if the oboe part was amplified and processed with a set of effects pedals?

While perhaps less efficient in a strict sense, these approaches where decision-making is temporarily (or permanently) decentralized from conductor to multiple stakeholders could open new spaces for musical engagement and reconfigure relationships between orchestras and communities. In these moments, the aims and goals of an orchestra might shift from working towards perfecting music for a performance or communicating a composer’s intent accurately, to supporting imagination, learning, and exploration.12 The orchestra might expand from a focus of performing preexisting music for audiences to more variegated functions that range from bringing music theory to life for students to joyful creative experiments with people interested in something more than attending the occasional concert, or those who otherwise lack a connection to the ensemble.

Members of the Orchestra

Orchestras might also reflect on who they hire and the types of skills, understanding, dispositions, and expertise that an orchestra member needs to support the institution’s goals. Organizations interested in a greater degree of transformation might expand the types of musicians they employ to support a greater diversity of musical styles, musical practices, and musical engagement with and for communities. Other ensembles interested in maintaining the instrumentation and structure of the traditional orchestra could support and reward musicians for applying their flexible musicianship and fluency in the types of improvisatory, creative, and collaborative practices needed for participatory music-making. Orchestras might also restructure their staffs or partner with other organizations to include a wider variety of roles focused on community engagement and collaboration, ranging from experts in equity and ethics to young people serving as advisors and consultants.

Orchestras embodying, expecting, and supporting more participatory forms of engagement could also send a powerful message to programs that educate future musicians. What if orchestras expected incoming employees to have deep understanding and skills in facilitating learning and musical engagement, or improvisatory and creative musicianship, equal to that of their performing ability with repertoire from the canon? What are the possible trajectories of future orchestra musicians when they engage with music education coursework alongside their applied studio lessons and music theory classes? What might orchestra auditions look and sound like if they assessed future members’ abilities to engage in ethical, equitable, and generative dialogue with local community members? What types of contracts, opportunities, and responsibilities might be part of the job when community engagement and learning are valued and prioritized coequally with performing? As orchestras evolve and transform in ways that embrace their communities, the roles and responsibilities of orchestral musicians will likely change. Conversations about what it means to be an orchestra musician and what equitable work and contracts entail are essential to such growth.

Infrastructure and Learning

Orchestras serious about participatory approaches to engaging with communities should reflect on the emphases of their current infrastructure and the resources that might best support this work. The ways that orchestras allocate resources reflect and reveal their values. Perhaps orchestras might identify strategies to raise the resources needed to support more participatory ways of being with communities. This might involve existing donors, but also grants, foundations, or initiatives ranging from creative campaigns with emerging technologies (blockchain, artificial intelligence, AR/XR/VR) to developing relationships and plans with organizations beyond the arts and culture sectors. However, when existing or new funding is unavailable and adding time is impossible, orchestras will need to reckon with their values. Transformative change and participatory engagement with communities might call for sacrificing aspects of status quo practices and programming, and concomitant reallocations of resources.

For instance, committing to the types of community engagement discussed throughout this chapter may involve shifting time, energy, and funding away from the typical workings of orchestras, such as the number of large-scale performances in the concert hall, and towards collaborative work shared across the entire institution. To support the types of participatory engagement explored here, orchestras might expand and center their education and community engagement departments. This might also mean having musicians, staff, and administration spend time (significantly, time that could otherwise be spent on traditional operational tasks and, for musicians, solo practice, group rehearsal, or other commitments) developing deep relationships and partnerships with schools, universities, community organizations, and community members by engaging with these stakeholders regularly within their varied settings as part of their work. The members who engage in such relationship-building could discuss their experiences and what they learn with their peers as part of the orchestra’s ongoing education with and of the community.

In making equity and learning core to their DNA, orchestras might invest in these values by supporting members in further developing the skills, understandings, and dispositions needed to collaborate, co-design, and co-facilitate participatory engagement. This could include collaborating with learning-oriented organizations and people to support this work—ranging from university music learning and teaching programs, K-12 arts educators, and teaching artists to young people and creative youth development organizations, along with experts in justice and equity. What if orchestras supported their employees’ individual and collective capacity-building in community development, social transformation, creativity, ethics, equity, and other areas of interest?

By partnering with local university music education programs and other units that connect with community work, orchestra musicians might engage in professional development to build skills in facilitating learning and music engagement. What if orchestra musicians were compensated to engage in music education courses, developing pedagogical chops while building relationships with current and future music educators whose students are potential concert attendees and collaborators? What if orchestra musicians skilled in engaging with young people worked alongside music educators in K-12 settings as part of their orchestral work? What might be possible when the model of presenting music to students in school assemblies expands to longer-term collaborations guided by a participatory ethic and approach?

Orchestras can build on any of the ideas explored throughout this chapter while continuing to present beloved, beautifully arranged and performed music to audiences. Embracing a more participatory approach, however, could revitalize orchestras’ roles in their communities and strengthen their place throughout society. Wherever an orchestra is on its journey towards more participatory and expansive ways of engaging with communities, movement forward is best accomplished collaboratively with equity and learning at the core. The possibilities ahead are exciting.

Notes

• 1 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

• 2 Orchestras range widely in terms of their approaches to designing programs and materials, with varying degrees of interactivity. For a snapshot of some approaches, see David Louis Fairchild, “Beyond Tradition: An Update Revisiting Partnerships among Orchestras, Schools, and Communities,” PhD dissertation (University of Georgia, 2018), https://esploro.libs.uga.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Beyond-tradition–an-update-revisiting/9949334479302959.

• 3 Alex Laing and I experimented with such a process in the #LiquidWeber project: https://liquidweber.com.

• 4 For more information on Creative Commons licensing, and to view existing types of Creative Commons licenses, each allowing different kinds of free sharing, remixing, and reuse, see “About CC Licenses,” Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses.

• 5 I discuss some of these possibilities in relation to ensembles and compositions in more detail in two publications: Evan S. Tobias, “Inviting Possibilities for New Music and Music Education, New Music USA, September 23, 2013, https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/inviting-possibilities-for-new-music-and-music-education, and Evan S. Tobias, “Toward Convergence: Adapting Music Education to Contemporary Society and Participatory Culture,” Music Educators Journal 99, no. 4 (2013): 29-36, https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432113483318.

• 6 In Music as Social Life (2008), Turino also discusses participatory performance as optimizing for different goals, in contrast with traditional performance models that aspire to aesthetic novelty or artistic virtuosity: “where there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles, the primary goal being to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role” (26).

• 7 See Video Games Live, https://www.videogameslive.com, and Fifth House Ensemble’s Live Interactive Video Game Music Performances, https://www.fifth-house.com/perf-programs.

• 8 For an example of this type or project, see “A Night in the Fields: Creating Live Music to Videogame Play,” presented in 2016 by the Consortium for Innovation and Transformation in Music Education at Arizona State University: http://citme.music.asu.edu/2016/05/02/a-night-in-the-fields-creating-live-music-to-videogame-play.

• 9 This vignette is inspired by Arizona State University’s The Weight of Light book project, https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight, and a STEAM education initiative involving high school students imagining possible solar futures of their communities through music, https://citme.music.asu.edu/initiatives/transforming-society/weight-of-light.

• 10 For a curated set of related examples among orchestras, see https://evantobias.net/participatoryorchestras.

• 11 Consider examples such as the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, https://www.theviolinchannel.com/blog-orpheus-chamber-orchestra-james-wilson-process-inner-workings, and A Far Cry, https://www.afarcry.org/group-bio.

• 12 For a deeper exploration on music as an open text for multiple possibilities of engagement, see Randall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (Indiana University Press, 2016).

The Improvised Concerto

By William Cheng

What would it look, sound, and feel like for a soloist and an orchestra to improvise through the entirety of a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto—or any concerto—and what would be the point?

i. grind & crunch

As a college student and classical pianist in training, you’re slated to perform a Rachmaninoff concerto with your university orchestra in just under a month. But you’ve hardly started learning the notorious cadenza, the solo section near the end of the first movement. Although you spent the last two years grinding at the Third Piano Concerto, Op. 30, you now find yourself running out of time. The musical work is a devilish gauntlet: three sprawling movements over 45 exhausting minutes with tens of thousands of finger-tripping, wrist-twisting notes.

Dread pervades all your dreams, and cold panic greets you each morning. You realize you could spend every waking minute in a practice room for the next three weeks—you could sleep in there!—and you still wouldn’t have enough time to learn and memorize the cadenza properly, much less play it reliably.

One fact exacerbates your dilemma and, in retrospect, partially explains your procrastination: Rachmaninoff wrote two cadenza options for the first movement—a rapid, bouncy version (the toccata cadenza) and a slower, heavier version with rumbling bass and thundering chords (labeled as the alternate, or ossia, though Rachmaninoff composed it first). The two options are commensurate in length and difficult in different ways. Rachmaninoff himself only performed the former, but many pianists today go with the latter. You’ve struggled to choose between the two.

Your crisis would be laughable if it didn’t feel existential. Forgetting or whiffing a few notes during a concerto performance? So bad. Flopping or omitting a four-minute solo? Completely unimaginable.

You could bail on the whole performance. Make up an excuse. Make the conductor and orchestra furious. Make amends later, somehow, for your terrible planning and immense failure.

Another option: make up your own cadenza.

In a nadir of exhaustion and despair one evening a couple of weeks before the performance, you begin to wonder whether you could play something else entirely during your solo. What, though? Really, anything. The orchestra gets to rest. So long as the conductor knows in advance how you plan to transition out of the cadenza—for instance, via a big trill or cascade (plus eye contact and reciprocal head nods) that will conspicuously telegraph your readiness to move onto the subsequent Meno mosso section—you can play whatever you like. You can conjure a cadenza that is neither the toccata nor the ossia yet may draw inspiration from both. Or you veer midway into a fiery neo-Baroque fugue before dissolving into an elegiac chorale. Maybe you lurch into a maximalist apotheosis of tone clusters and teeth-clenching dissonance. Stay breezy or summon leviathan. All is fair game while you vamp and romp in the cadenza’s time-stopped sandbox.

Thanks to your music history courses in college, you are aware that improvisatory practices—preludes, descants, cadenzas, free play—were commonly embraced by performers of European classical music in earlier centuries. By the twentieth century, however, these practices had largely declined. In the twenty-first century, the occasional pianist might improvise or compose an original cadenza for a Mozart concerto.1 But for the big Romantic concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev—the perennial warhorses trotted out at international piano competitions—cadenzas are virtually never fiddled with or swapped out. Composers’ original cadenzas (and concertos as a whole) are routinely executed note for note, with diligent performers loath to add even the tiniest ornament.

A cadenza typically riffs on one or more of a concerto’s melodic themes. As you practice improvising cadenzas for the first movement of the Rach 3, you experiment with structures, configurations, flourishes, dramatic arcs, and ways of feeling. Sometimes, your attempts sound aimless, embarrassing, uncouth. Sometimes, you sound okay.

And sometimes, the specter of Rachmaninoff sits next to you as you practice.

You know what he looks like. You’ve seen photographs in textbooks and on the Internet. Tall, slender, suited in a tie and a long dark coat. A parabolic jaw framing spare—even gaunt—cheeks. Narrow eyes, prominent ears, pursed lips. “A six-and-a-half-foot scowl,” Igor Stravinsky once called the Russian émigré.

Anyway, Rachmaninoff’s ghost. What would he say to you? Perhaps berate your audacity. Perhaps murmur affirmations and tell you, Keep going. Perhaps nothing.

ii. ghosts

Around this time, you spend days reading about Rachmaninoff’s life and music. For the university orchestra’s spring concert, the conductor has asked you to write the program notes for the Third Piano Concerto. You happily oblige and come up with a straightforward paragraph summarizing the work’s compositional process, 1909 premiere, and mixed early reception.

While poring over biographies of Rachmaninoff, you’re gripped by a harrowing episode early in his career: the critical reactions to his First Symphony. Rachmaninoff composed this symphony in 1895, and it received a calamitous premiere in 1897 under the baton of Alexander Glazunov. Rachmaninoff recalled:

During the evening I could not go into the concert hall. I left the artists’ room and hid myself, sitting on an iron fire-escape staircase […]: it was the most agonizing hour of my life! Sometimes I stuck my fingers in my ears to prevent myself from hearing my own music, the discords of which absolutely tortured me. Only one thought hammered in my brain—“How is it possible? What is the cause of it?” No sooner had the last chords died away than I fled, horrified, into the street. I ran to the Nevsky-Prospect, boarded one of the trams, so familiar to me from childhood, and drove incessantly up and down the endless street, through wind and mist, martyred by the thought of my failure. […] I had thought that I knew exactly where I stood. All my hopes, all belief in myself, had been destroyed.2

The composer and critic César Cui showed no mercy in his review of the symphony’s premiere. His grievances conflate the musical and moral, appraising the composition as not only aesthetically distasteful but outright sinful in sensibility:

If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.3

Rachmaninoff blamed the terrible premiere on the poor rehearsals and Glazunov’s inept (and allegedly inebriated) conducting. But the composer couldn’t help wondering whether he should also blame himself. In his reflections, Rachmaninoff oscillates between proclaiming that he loves his First Symphony and worrying whether he loves the piece solely because he composed it. He even imagines ripping up the manuscript one day.4

I am deeply distressed and heavily depressed by the fact that my Symphony, though I loved it very much and love it now, did not please me at all after its first rehearsal. This means, you’ll say, that it’s poorly orchestrated. But I am convinced, I reply, that good music can shine through poor instrumentation, nor do I consider the instrumentation to be wholly unsuccessful. So two surmises remain. Either, like some composers, I am unduly partial to this composition, or this composition was poorly performed. And [the latter] is what really happened. I am amazed—how can a man with the high talent of Glazunov conduct so badly? I speak not merely of his conducting technique (there’s no use asking this of him), but of his musicianship. He feels nothing when he conducts—as if he understands nothing! […] So I assume that the performance may have been the cause of the failure (I do not assert—I assume). If the public were familiar with the symphony, they would blame the conductor (I continue to “assume”), but when a composition is both unknown and badly performed, the public is inclined to blame the composer. […] As you see, at present I’m inclined to blame the performance. Tomorrow, probably, this opinion, too, will change. In any case I will not reject this Symphony, and after leaving it alone for six months, I’ll look at it, perhaps correct it, and perhaps publish it, but perhaps by then my partiality for it will have passed. Then I’ll tear it up.5

In the years following the First Symphony’s premiere, Rachmaninoff suffered a psychological collapse and couldn’t bring himself to compose as usual. Only after months of hypnotherapy treatment in 1900 with Dr. Nikolai Vladimirovich Dahl did Rachmaninoff resume his craft, producing the Second Piano Concerto (1901), dedicated to Dahl.6

Reading the adamantly self-doubting words of a perfectionist such as Rachmaninoff is an uncanny experience. When you gaze at the score of a Rachmaninoff symphony or concerto, every note appears painstakingly placed. Ink is dry, engraving pristine. So the last thing you’d think about is how intensely Rachmaninoff deprecated and second-guessed his own published work. You are simultaneously perplexed and heartened by the many perhaps peppering his reminiscences of the First Symphony. The litany of perhaps clues you into a likely truth oft-obscured by pervasive understandings of classical music scores as authoritative, finalized scripts that faithfully encapsulate a composer’s idiosyncratic creative vision: composers are, as much as anyone, full of doubt, and such doubt—characterized by a humbling awareness of alternative creative choices as constant possibilities—is a formative element of the compositional process itself. Creativity is doubt in motion, an activation of imaginations of something otherwise. Perhaps Rachmaninoff ultimately composed as he did not despite but precisely because of all his ruminative perhapsing.

Perhaps and perfectionism aren’t opposites. Each is immanent in the other. On the one hand, someone could say that Rachmaninoff’s self-professed and well-documented perfectionist impulses should render his finished compositions less amenable to revision and embellishment: this is exactly the way Rachmaninoff wanted his music to sound. On the other hand, the paradoxical valence of perfectionism—the inherent undefinability and unachievability of so-called perfection, a conundrum Rachmaninoff explicitly bemoaned—suggests that recomposition and improvisatoriness (if not always improvisation outright) were often instrumental in the composer’s creative process: this was, for Rachmaninoff, one way (among potential others) the music could imaginably sound.

iii. 2006/2023/2073

Two weeks out. Counting down to curtains up is frying your nerves. You have never before performed a concerto with a full orchestra. Your parents are flying in from Canada to attend the concert. Your friends are bubbling over with sympathetic excitement, and you don’t have the heart to tell them how scared you are. Worst-case scenarios hijack your mind.

At least you’ve managed, by now, to sketch out a basic outline for the kind of cadenza you plan to improvise: form, melody, chord progression. A lead sheet of sorts. You practice and practice and practice, and practice is different these days. For this practice is no longer a classic musical rehearsal that aspires to the accurate execution of a singular permutation of preordained notes—like practicing archery to hit a bull’s-eye every time. Rather, it has become a practice whose iterative variations expose the arbitrary rubrics of perfection and perfectibility to begin with—letting arrows fly with no artificial targets in sight. No foam boards, painted rings, point values. Just gestures, trajectories, and observations of where things land.

The day of the concert arrives. A warm spring evening in 2006. If this were a Hollywood movie (Scott Hicks and Jan Sardi’s 1996 drama Shine comes to mind), your Rach 3 performance would be the climax of your story, and the improvised cadenza in the first movement would be the climax within the climax, the heroic perils and virtuosities animated by electrifying prose. Long into the future, though, this is what you will mostly remember about the performance: it was far from perfect, but it went perfectly fine. Friends and family showed up. You were well-rested. You didn’t suffer dreaded memory lapses. You debuted your half-precomposed, half-improvised cadenza. The conductor and orchestra were marvelous. The audience was gracious and game.

Imperfect yet nondisastrous, the concerto performance does become a tipping point in your life. It nudges you toward a sobering and no-longer-deferrable realization: you’re not cut out to be a concert pianist—not even close. In college, majoring in music performance and playing occasional recitals was one thing; a lifetime career seemed an entirely different beast.

The beast shapeshifts a lot. Most days, it takes on the guise of intractable stage fright. It also manifests as musculoskeletal strain, endless solitary practice, and random bouts of despondence.

Upon graduating college, you spend the next fifteen years researching and writing about music. You keep up with piano practice but without the slightest professional ambition. Once in a while, you dust off Rach 3 and casually play through the piece alone, just to keep it in your fingers and muscle memory. You feel especially wistful when you reach the cadenza, which you continue to improvise throughout. (To this day, you haven’t learned either cadenza composed by Rachmaninoff; anytime you sit down to read through the toccata or ossia as written, you invariably surrender halfway and start improvising the rest, as if you can’t help it.)

In 2013, you develop a severe chronic pain condition. It isolates and breaks you, wrenching you away from piano, work, loved ones, and the rhythms of everyday life. You eventually put the pain into words, and this practice of writing the self feels at once like understatement and overexposure.7 After five years of (mis)diagnoses and multiple surgeries, the condition gradually begins to resolve. You start playing the piano again.

In the spring of 2023, you’re invited to a two-day workshop at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The workshop’s key questions focus on the future of American symphony orchestras—their relevance, equity, sustainability, and adaptability across changing sociocultural terrains of the twenty-first century and beyond. Other participants include sci-fi novelists, arts activists, educators, and administrators, as well as an engineer, a physician, and a DJ. This eclectic group convenes, converses, takes field trips, and engages in speculative writing exercises. At the end of two days together, you each return home to reflect on what you have learned and, later, to draft a short story or an essay on a subject of your choosing for an edited volume titled Sound Systems.

You choose to write about the idea of an improvised concerto.

2023 also happens to mark the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth. The composer’s works are widely feted and programmed. As a monumental feat, the virtuoso Yuja Wang delivers a series of marathon performances, each one featuring all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos as well as the pseudo-concerto “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.”8 Other musicians and ensembles likewise embrace the commemorative year as an opportunity to spotlight Rachmaninoff’s orchestral, chamber, choral, and solo repertoire.

As much as any classical music lover, you are awestruck when watching anyone perform a super-difficult concerto (or five!). It sure seems to take superhuman levels of precision, stamina, focus, muscularity, motivation, and courage in order to learn, memorize, and reliably execute a brain-melting quantity of notes. There’s nothing quite like choreography executed to a tee. A figure skater landing all of the jumps in a long program, an acrobat acing a high-wire act: the discipline, perseverance, and ever-present risk of conspicuous failure—from minor flubs to major falls—render these enterprises breathtaking.

Your curiosity about classical music improvisation in no way diminishes or encroaches on your appreciation of classical musicians who play classically. You certainly don’t wish for improvisatory practices to replace traditional or alternative practices wholesale, nor would you ever deem any one kind of practice better than another.

Still, you wonder. What if, say, for Rachmaninoff’s 200th anniversary in 2073, pianists gear up as usual to program all of the composer’s concertos—but, this time around, some musicians opt to improvise during parts of their performances?9 Or during the entirety of performances? Certain soloists may decide to limit their improvisations to first-movement cadenzas. Others might add extra variations—precomposed or improvised or something in between—to the twenty-four existing variations in the “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.” Conductors, orchestra musicians, and audiences could be encouraged to contribute to such improvisatoriness in both sound and spirit.

An improvised Rachmaninoff concerto can make audible the innumerable, multiversal, rhizomatic perhaps that, as we’ve heard from the composer himself, braids the DNA of his own compositions and revisionary palimpsests. The experiment stands to open a constellation of dimensional rifts showing that what Rachmaninoff wrote once lived (and may forever live) next door to what he might have written otherwise.

Classical musicians today generally aren’t trained, incentivized, and empowered to improvise. Many would say they can’t bring themselves to imagine recomposing or riffing on passages by Schubert or Schumann. Score adherence looms large. But just because something has not been done is not reason enough to eschew it. What is creativity if not peering beyond the boxes of theory and praxis into which we’ve been interpellated? What is virtuosity if not willfully pushing the limits of what’s believed to be possible?10

iv. un-unimaginable-able

All said, can you honestly imagine a soloist and an orchestra improvising through the full span of a Rachmaninoff concerto?

No and yes.

No, because the scenario is implausible, unprecedented, and anathema to pervasive traditions of classical concert programming today.

Yes, because posing a good-faith question about something’s imaginability tacitly activates an imagination of the thing in question.

Can you imagine being the soloist in one such scenario?

Before writing this chapter, you would’ve said no. But somewhere along the writing process itself, you inadvertently talk yourself into believing you—or anyone—could seek to stage exactly the kinds of improvised performances that you’re having so much fun fabulating about.

Strangely, you suspect you were able to imagine and expound on the idea of an improvised concerto precisely because you initially embraced it purely as a stakes-free thought experiment. Yet as you started putting pen to paper, your thoughts took on such palpable solidity that you subsequently struggled to imagine not following through with your ideas in practice. How could I? became Why wouldn’t I? The merely conceivable turned compellingly doable.

What’s the worst that could happen, anyway? It’s a reasonable question.

Well, while performing an improvised version of Rach 3, you could fly off the rails and leave the conductor discombobulated. The orchestra, despite valiant salvage efforts, falls apart. The audience is in full revolt by mid-concert, lambasting the extemporized undertaking as offensive, irreverent, and iconoclastic. Amid the chaos, someone sets fire to the concert hall. The building burns down. People, including children, die. The town plunges into outrage and mourning. A state of public emergency is declared. Congress and the FBI launch a joint probe. Things somehow get more nightmarish from there.

Absurd catastrophizing, as a matter of course, lives rent-free in the imaginariums of performers. What if I hit a wrong note in the first five seconds of the performance? What if this is the one time my mind goes blank? What if critics demolish me? Foreseeing a surfeit of routes toward failure in any given circumstance, performers mentally prepare for the worst while hoping to play their best.

In all likelihood, the worst that could happen during your improvised concerto performance is just that the performance might not go perfectly as planned—which is hardly the priority of improvisation (and of live performance) in the first place.

It’s worth remembering that musicians know how to fail the way gymnasts know how to fall: elegantly, intently, defiantly. Understanding the show must go on, performers—including those who claim not to improvise—demonstrate, time and again, survival instincts for maneuvering out of wrong turns and memory lapses. When attending classical music performances, audiences therefore tend to catch glimpses of improvisatoriness most commonly when performers mess up and activate damage control on the fly. Yet flights of improvisation need not be reserved only for desperate moments of rescuing oneself from inadvertent slips. Improvisation is an invitation to slip around with purpose and playfulness. Musicians, including classical musicians, should take comfort in knowing they already improvise far more frequently (and mundanely) than they claim to, and far more creatively than they believe they can.

So, an improvised Rach 3 performance to start. Rach 2, 4, 1—and Chopin and Brahms and Tchaikovsky piano concertos—to follow. Violin concertos adapted as improvised piano concertos, and vice versa. Improvised cello concertos, horn concertos, harp concertos. Double and triple concertos. Remixes, mashups, fusions. Possibilities are legion.

Who will attempt these experiments? It could be you. It doesn’t have to be you. Because it could be anyone.

It could be anyone. So it could be you.

It could be all of us.

v. just perhaps

There are infinite ways to improvise a concerto, and there are infinite ways—and reasons—to make improvised concertos happen.

While performing an improvised concerto, how would you take consistent creative liberties with the composer’s designated pitches, dynamics, rhythms, tempos, timbres, textures, articulations, and expressive markings? How difficult, uncomfortable, and rewarding would it be to deviate from a concerto’s familiar grooves? And to deviate differently each time? What about the conductor and the orchestra musicians? How do they adapt, play along, and co-improvise? What if performers, patrons, and institutions display zero appetite whatsoever for this kind of performance? What if they can’t get enough of it? What if the improvisable, modular, modifiable concerto becomes a celebratory locus for accessibility and connection? What if it enables and empowers musicians with small hands, mobility restrictions, memory impairments, neurodivergent minds, and physiological idiosyncrasies to perform otherwise forbidding repertoire? What if musicians trained in non-classical genres—say, someone who says they play free jazz—were invited to improvise solo concerto parts in their own idioms?11

Perhaps improvising concerto soloists will seek out and work with smaller ensembles that are, compared to full orchestras, resiliently nimble and reconfigurable. The orchestra part for Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, for example, can be reasonably arranged for a string quartet, some winds, and percussion.

Perhaps concert programs can feature both improvised and non-improvised concertos (along with improvised and non-improvised performances generally) to inspire reconsiderations around the stakes and metrics of success, virtuosity, style, and expressivity in music-making writ large.

Perhaps audiences are invited to drop in on rehearsals so that the mysteries around music improvisation and ensemble performance are demystified.

Perhaps ghosts, too, show up with bells on.

Perhaps let’s not wait till 2073!

Perhaps perhaps is how we begin.

Notes

• 1 See Aaron L. Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment(Oxford University Press, 2010), 153–176; and Dana Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music(Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–3.

• 2 Oskar von Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, translated by Dolly Rutherford (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1934), 99.

• 3 César Antonovich Cui (Tsezar Antonovich Kyei), “Tretiy russkiy simfonicheskiy kontsert,” Novosti i birzhevaya gazeta (17 March 1897), 3.

• 4 In his final major composition, the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, Rachmaninoff quotes several of his earlier works, including the opening theme of his Symphony No. 1. Such musical quotation—as with any creative choice involving ciphers and borrowed materials—may be interpreted in any number of ways: as revisitation, revision, repair, or even redemption, to name just a few.

• 5 Quoted in Bertensson, Jay Leyda, and Sophia Satina, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (New York University Press, 1956), 73–74.

• 6 Bertensson, Leyda, and Satina, Sergei Rachmaninoff, 96.

• 7 See William Cheng, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), 20–36; and William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford University Press, 2019), 30–32.

• 8 “Yuja Wang Plays All Four Rachmaninoff Concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra,” Yuja Wang, accessed April 25, 2024, http://yujawang.com/yuja-wang-plays-all-five-rachmaninoff-concertos-with-the-philadelphia-orchestra.

• 9 When Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37 in Vienna on April 5, 1803, Ignaz von Seyfried (the new conductor at the Theater an der Wien) turned pages for Beethoven during the concert. Seyfried recalled his alarm at discovering that the score was incomplete: “I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all of the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards” (Michael Steinberg, The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide [Oxford University Press, 1998], 60). Although this anecdote does not overtly state that Beethoven extemporized throughout the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3—implying instead that he played several not-yet-written-down passages from sheer memory—the performance might very well have contained, whether by design or exigency, elements of improvisation or improvisatoriness.

• 10 In 2015, concert pianist Gabriela Montero released her debut orchestral recording (Orchid Classics) featuring Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (as composed); the album also includes an original composition by Montero (“Ex Patria, Op. 1, In Memoriam”) as well as four original improvisations. Although Montero does not improvise in the performance of Rach 2, the album is creatively exceptional and ideationally tantalizing for its three-way juxtaposition of precomposed, newly composed, and improvised classical musics.

• 11 In 2006, the Classical Jazz Quartet (Kenny Barron, piano; Stefon Harris, vibraphone, marimba; Ron Carter, bass; Lewis Nash, drums) released The Classical Jazz Quartet Plays Rachmaninov (Kind of Blue Records). Spanning nine tracks, the album “rags the classics,” riffing here on the themes and sections from the three movements of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.

Why Gödel and Escher But Not Bach

By Punya Mishra

“Some music is better than other music, you know,” he said. “And I am right. And the students, they are just wrong.” Though he shared this sentiment with a chuckle, the meaning was blunt, and jarring. Some people laughed. Not all the people there, but a few. And nothing was said in response. His statement just sort of sat there, untouched and unquestioned. It was picked up later, when we broke up for coffee, after the session was done, not surprisingly by three people of color: an African American community strategist and scholar and two Indian American professors (I was one of the latter). We stood at a tall table, coffee cups in hand, somewhat bewildered by what we’d just heard. Did he really say that? we wondered. What was he thinking?

We had all been invited to be part of a conference on the role of beauty in our professional lives. Titled Beauty at Work, this conference brought together scientists and musicians, educators and artists, engineers and fashion designers. An eclectic bunch, as demanded by the topics at hand. Over the two days, our goal was to explore questions such as these: “Where do we find beauty in our work? What role does it play in what we do, and how might it help or hinder us?” We were trying to, as the conference website described it, “illuminate the role of beauty in shaping work across a variety of domains.”

The moment that took me aback happened during a paper-presentation session—one with a relatively innocuous title, “Convergences and Divergences in Art and Science.” At some point, the conversation turned to music. One of the speakers, a professor of classical music, shared that students often challenged his idea of musical beauty, citing examples of music from their own lives. He said that he found it disturbing, and decried just how misguided his students were in their understanding of musical beauty.

The arrogance of this statement troubled me. I wondered what he would think of my musical tastes—a weird mixed-up grab-bag of contemporary and 1950s Bollywood, Latin fusion, classic rock, Sufi ghazals, and whatever unexpected gems Spotify throws my way. And it also brought home to me the complex relationships between ideas of beauty, our tastes and preferences as individuals, our personal histories, and our shared histories and stories. Paradoxes and tensions abound in these contexts, and often are left unsaid and unexplored.

This was just one of the tensions that I had felt at the conference. The other had to do with the space where the event was held. Somewhat appropriately, given the theme, we gathered in a beautiful fieldstone Gothic-architecture building on the campus of the Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC. Maloney Hall is more than 100 years old, a classical building with pointed arches and spires, rich in intricate decoration and detail. It’s equally impressive inside, with a large open space, high vaulted ceilings, and beautiful stained-glass windows that flood the interior with light from the outside.

In many ways this is a sacred space. A space of calm. A space for learning and reflection. Few people would be able to resist its beauty and old-world charm.

And yet, the building is also strangely modern. It is, after all, home to the Busch School of Business and Economics, and recently underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation, making its amenities comparable to those found in other top business schools. This leads to some interesting contrasts: ornate statues of saints standing silently next to large monitors that promote an upcoming business fair, with bold type and images of smiling good-looking young people, and marble staircases that lead to technology-rich, whiteboard-walled rooms for collaboration. The building also hosts a chapel, maybe the only prominent business school to do so.

The sacred, cheek by jowl, with the profane.

The Sacred and the Profane, as it happens, is also the title of a book written by the Romanian-born historian of religion Mircea Eliade and published in 1968.1 Eliade, the Sewell Avery Distinguished Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, was a historian, philosopher, essayist, and novelist. He authored many books over the course of a distinguished career, spanning genres and styles, from memoirs to theoretical treatises, fantastic novellas to scholarly works. But the ideas he introduced in this slim volume have been maybe the most enduring and influential. He argued that the human experience of reality, of space and time, is split in two—the sacred and profane. In Eliade’s telling, the sacred is a divine creative force that manifests itself in human life in many ways, through rituals, symbols, and sacred objects. The profane, in contrast, encompasses the ordinary and mundane aspects of reality that do not reveal any transcendent meaning or value. 

All of these musings and memories got me wondering about why the profane, the mongrel, the mashup, the mixtape has always been more meaningful to me. At that conference, I was confronted, along multiple dimensions, with Eliade’s ideas. This confrontation was manifest in the design and experience of the space itself, where the sacred and transcendent rub shoulders with the messiness of business and commerce. It emerged in that discussion on identifying beauty in music, where the classical-music scholar so blithely undermined the musical experiences of his students. Certain spaces are better—elevated, perhaps, closer to the rarefied realms of the sacred. Certain forms of music are better.

These questions are relevant to this discussion we are engaged in, in this book, about the future of orchestras. Pondering these questions in light of my own life experiences has brought home to me the complexities of the underlying issues. At one level, as a non-practicing cultural Hindu (if I can co-opt a phrase from Richard Dawkins2) I can feel moved by architecture; the classical Gothic architecture of Maloney Hall, despite being rooted in European cultural norms and Catholic symbolism, speaks to a certain universality of aesthetic experience. Yet, at the same time the almost throwaway comment about certain kinds of music being better than others emphasized to me just how much of an outsider I still am.

Although I recognize that all cultures and religions have ways of creating spaces, times, and events that allow people to connect with the sacred and escape from the profane, there are, and will continue to be, spaces that are not open to all, myself included. And even if we can agree that music is one of the ways that people can create or express or connect with the sacred or the profane—and that different forms or genres can evoke alternate realities or even transcend reality—the concept of music excluding those who “don’t get it” extends beyond mere disturbance or offense at disruptions to order. It encompasses the nuanced realities of musical appreciation that require a certain sense of cultural literacy or acculturation—a “training of the ear,” if you like, that any music demands, beyond what it sounds like. It requires understanding the web of references and allusions to other compositions, or the historical and cultural context that enriches our appreciation of a piece. This exclusion of people from the sanctified spaces created by and with music stems not just from a rejection of the unfamiliar. It also reflects a gap in access to or familiarity with these deeper layers of musical engagement, where the full appreciation of a piece’s innovation or its dialogue with tradition presupposes a level of acculturation that many may not possess.

And when it comes to classical music, clearly it is something I do not possess. That said, it isn’t because I have not tried. Back in high school, I was introduced to a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.3 The mathematician Martin Gardner wrote in his review of the book for Scientific American (which is how I first learned of it), “Every few decades an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event. Gödel, Escher, Bach… is such a work.”4

I had an incipient love of math and science, of art and paradoxes, so this book, with its exploration of deep ideas of self and soul, combined with silly wordplay and whimsical illustrations, appealed to me deeply. Hofstadter, in his unique manner, explores the connections and parallels among the works of three geniuses: the mathematician Kurt Gödel, the artist M.C. Escher, and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. He seeks to demonstrate how all three used logic, art, and music to create complex and beautiful patterns and structures that provide deep insights into the nature of reality and the mind. He argues for the value of using self-reference, recursion, and paradox to challenge and transcend the limits of logic, art, and music. To say that I was fascinated by the book would be to miss the point. I devoured the book. Over and over. The ideas of Gödel and Escher moved me, opening vistas of thoughts and ideas that are meaningful to me to this day. I admired their brilliance and creativity, their rigor and elegance, their playfulness and profundity. Even today, the ideas I read back then as a teenager in New Delhi inspire me and the work I do, whether they be self-referential examples of visual wordplay or the paradoxical “Happy New Year” videos I make with my children every year. They have stayed with me in my love of math, though I am not and never will be a mathematician.

Bach, however, was harder for me to grasp than Hofstadter’s other two subjects. The words on the page seemed to make meaning, but the music did not. Bach’s music, to me, was like a foreign language that I could not understand or appreciate. It was not that I, as a teenager, understood Gödel’s theorem, but I felt that with effort and enough college credit-hours, I would get it—and that it would be cool to have done so. Bach’s music did not move me or inspire me the same way. And trust me, I tried. So hard. I would listen to cassette after cassette of Bach, as well as Mozart and Liszt, wanting desperately to hear what Hofstadter was telling me was there. When I met Hofstadter many years later, during graduate school, I told him as much. Gödel and Escher made sense to me. Bach just did not. And my childhood hero, surprised and puzzled, suggested that maybe it was because I hadn’t tried hard enough. The beauty of Bach and the connections to Gödel and Escher and self-reference and play just seemed so obvious to him.

I wasn’t so sure. I had tried and tried. It just didn’t work. That music does not touch my soul. But all it took was listening to one song in Mehdi Hassan’s recording of his ghazals at the Royal Albert Hall to transfix me. Just one time listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall to blow me away. These albums still move me. They touch me in ways that Bach, and other Western classical music, never has.

The reason I am bringing all this up is to complicate the story. There are no straight threads to follow here. Connecting with a piece of music has to do, clearly, with individual taste, likes and dislikes. It has to do with the culture we grow up in, the music we listen to during our youth. But it also speaks to our ability to break out of the culture that we grew up in, as we mature and explore the world. It also speaks to aesthetic experiences that are regarded as being sacred by one group, which may not come across the same way to other groups. There are histories of power relations involved as well: histories of groups that have regarded certain forms of art and beauty as being superior and have imposed that sense of superiority on others. These norms of beauty and goodness have been justifications for genocide and the decimation of whole swaths of people. There is a bloody history here that I cannot ignore. This is why Mehdi Hassan’s ghazals may never be regarded as having the same cultural and intellectual value as a concerto by Bach.

And yet, I am a child of the Enlightenment. These values, cooked up in the salons of France, the bookshops and scientific and literary organizations in England, speak to me. They inspire me, even while their history tells me that I am not included when these august intellectuals write of the equality of all men. (Clearly, women are excluded from this grand notion of equality as well.)

I have always felt uncomfortable in symphony halls. I have never felt like I have belonged there. But how much of my discomfort comes from the fact that they are regarded as “sacred” spaces, with forms of decorum and accepted modes of engagement that have kept me away? I wonder if my preference for the mongrel and the profane is a sign of my continued ignorance, or of my rebellion against this imposed notion of sanctity, built as it is on exclusion and violence.

As I reflect on these ideas and wonder about the future, I hope that orchestras and their music can change and grow. Orchestras need more mongrelization. To me, the future of orchestras lies in this. It lies in becoming more respectful and responsive to the diversity and complexity of people and cultures. That they recognize music is deeply cultural, but also deeply personal, and deeply human. That orchestras can become places that are sacred to all, where music is created and performed that speaks to the soul of every person and every culture. Music can both connect and transcend the binaries we create to navigate and understand our lived experiences: the logical and the mysterious; the mundane reality and the lofty spiritual; the self and the other; the sacred and the profane. Music can also lay bare the contradictions and paradoxes that exist in our lives, our complicated histories. It can be simultaneously the source of creativity and conflict, of beauty and pain, of growth and stagnation.

I hope orchestras can be critical and curious, open and humble, mindful and responsive. It will require respecting difference, being open to other options, not rejecting the experiences of those to whom certain classical styles may not speak. This orchestral future must not reiterate the statement of the music professor: I am right, and you are wrong.

Epilogue: Eliade in India

In writing this essay, I came to learn of a deeper connection between Eliade and India, my land of birth. Eliade traveled to India when he was in his twenties, and wrote a piece of fiction about his time there, about his falling in love with a 16-year-old woman, Maitreyi Devi, and how that love was not to be. That book, published in 1933, was a bestseller, and helped to launch his career as a man of letters. The novel fictionalized the Eliade stand-in character, including his name and nationality, but named the young woman involved—in fact, he titled the book Maitreyi (though it is sometimes known as La Nuit Bengali or Bengal Nights).

The real Maitreyi Devi did not find out that Eliade that written this book until years later. She was shocked by some of the of the things Eliade had made up, which caused untold pain to her personally, and affected her socially as well. She argued that not only had he made up many of the events in the book, he had completely misunderstood Indian culture. Despite his erudition, he had been unethical and disrespectful. Decades later, in 1974, she published her own version of the story, Na Hanyate, which was a bestseller in India, but received little traction in the west. Maitreyi Devi, by all accounts, had a successful life in India as a social activist and artist, while Eliade was a famous professor at the University of Chicago. They did meet once more, many years later, when she visited Chicago and got him to promise not to publish the book in English during either of their lifetimes, which is why it did not appear in English until 1993. Despite this, it’s not surprising, given his relative fame, that it was his version of the story that ended up becoming a movie in 1988, starring Hugh Grant as the young Eliade.5 Devi had to sue to ensure that the name of the lead female character would be changed. As it was.

There is just so much here to unpack—from the power of colonialism to elevate certain perspectives and undermine others, to whose stories get told and who must fight, against overwhelming odds, to protect their name. It is this history that we need to question. We cannot exclude and silence, and hope that the art will still speak to all.

This somewhat tragic story of two humans, existing in two different worlds, seeking yet failing to connect, resonates with the challenges that orchestras face today: how to blend and build bridges among diverse cultural registers, while also confronting the forces of exclusion that undergird classical music’s sacred aura.

Notes

• 1 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask (Harper Torchbooks, 1961).

• 2 Richard Dawkins, “I’m a cultural Christian,” BBC News, December 10, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7136682.stm.

• 3 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979).

• 4 Martin Gardner, “Douglas R. Hofstadter’s ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach,’” Mathematical Games column, Scientific American 241, no. 1 (July 1979).

• 5 The Bengali Night, directed by Nicolas Klotz (1988; Gaumont), feature film.