Keeping Score - "Updating Uncle Lenny"

Alex Yates · 11-05-2006, 01:18 PM

New series by Michael Tilson-Thomas. NYT article.

Music
Updating ‘Uncle Lenny’ for a Multitasking Age

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: November 3, 2006

Even before his career took off, the young Leonard Bernstein sized up television and thought, first, that it was potentially the greatest tool for general music education and, second, that he was the ideal television teacher. He was right on both counts.
San Francisco Symphony

In 1958, Bernstein, by then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, presented his first Young People’s Concert, which was televised nationally. The broadcasts continued for 15 years and have never been equaled.
The field of classical music has long been waiting for some musician to come along who could use television with Bernstein’s galvanizing impact. The closest, it seemed, has been the dynamic maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, a natural who has masterminded some impressive shows. Until recently, though, TV had not been a central component of Mr. Thomas’s work.
That has now changed. Mr. Thomas is the creative force behind a $23 million, five-year project titled “Keeping Score.” Developed by the San Francisco Symphony, where Mr. Thomas is in his 11th season as music director, “Keeping Score” comprises a series of PBS television shows, an interactive Web site, a series of radio broadcasts, documentary and live performance DVDs and a program for public schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, that is starting this fall in selected cities in California and Arizona.
This ambitious project would not amount to much if it did not have the right communicator directing things. Mr. Thomas is that person, as the first three “Keeping Score” TV shows make clear. Last night various PBS stations began broadcasting the first 60-minute installment, which explores Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. (It will be broadcast in New York on Channel 13 at noon on Sunday.)
Filmed in and around Vienna, where the “Eroica” was first performed in 1805, the show offers Mr. Thomas analyzing the work at the piano, discussing its impact and rehearsing it with his musicians. It still sounds revolutionary as played here with bracing energy, fleet tempos and incisive execution.
Mr. Thomas takes on some lofty questions: What is heroic about the music? What did it mean to the composer, who was going deaf at the time he wrote it? How can a symphony titled the “Eroica” end with a finale that seems almost grotesquely comic? He also delves into the details of musical life in early-19th-century Vienna, with profiles of Beethoven’s patrons, rivals and enemies.
The other two “Keeping Score” shows, which will also be shown on Sundays at noon on Channel 13, focus on Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (Nov. 12) and “Copland and the American Sound” (Nov. 19).
Mr. Thomas understands that television and television viewing have changed radically since Bernstein’s day. The Young People’s Concerts were like engaging lectures with musical illustrations. Standing before the Philharmonic with a piano nearby, Bernstein was unslick, authentic and mesmerizing. He demystified music, playing excerpts, singing phrases in his gravel-pit voice, shuffling through his note cards and not caring that he perspired profusely. His topics were posed as sweeping questions: “What Does Music Mean?” “What Is a Mode?” “What Is Impressionism?” He expected his young people at home and in the hall to pay attention.
Alas, as Mr. Thomas explained in an interview in New York in June, musical understanding — among young people and even most parents — has slipped badly since then. “The things Lenny assumes his public understands, even the words he uses — it’s tragic to compare it to today,” Mr. Thomas said.
Though he hopes that youngsters will give the “Keeping Score” programs a chance, he said that of necessity his target audience was “families, young adults, parents with some interest who want to introduce their kids to music and talk about the programs together.”
Consequently, though the discussion is carried mainly by the kinetic and articulate Mr. Thomas, who at 61 looks and acts half his age, the shows jump from shot to shot, person to person — the norm today. The balance between the “camera shot rhythm and the content rhythm,” as Mr. Thomas put it, is geared to engage viewers used to today’s quick-cutting techniques.
A flutist is seen working at home on a tricky passage from the finale of the “Eroica.” Then the camera segues to the flutist onstage with the orchestra, playing that passage in context. One moment Mr. Thomas thumps out a brutal rhythmic figure from “The Rite of Spring” at the piano, and the next he is at the podium conducting the riff in all its terrifying orchestral incandescence.
The shows are unlike the Young People’s Concerts in another way: “Lenny, God bless him, always assumed the position of the world’s foremost authority on everything,” Mr. Thomas said. Unlike Bernstein, Mr. Thomas draws on multiple voices. He wants diverse viewers to identify with the diverse musicians of the orchestra, some of whom are also engaging characters. There is a delightful scene, for example, when the boyish bass clarinetist Ben Freimuth describes the opening of “The Rite of Spring.” Starting with the bassoon playing the eerie opening melody, the wind instruments enter one by one, as if beginning a somber conversation. Soon, though, the oblivious bass clarinet intrudes with a growling, insistent riff, “like some meathead,” Mr. Freimuth says. You can imagine young viewers immediately getting the musical point.
A pilot of “Keeping Score” was broadcast two years ago, with Mr. Thomas discussing and performing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. While very promising, the show attempted too much. It was both an explication of the symphony and a detailed explanation of how a performance is prepared, rehearsed and executed. The preparations showed everything, down to a detailed scene of an oboist shaving thin reeds from a block of bamboo.
But the three shows that are officially kicking off “Keeping Score” are focused and cohesive. For young people who may find the shows too sophisticated, as well as for those who want to learn more, there is the Web site, keepingscore.org, which was developed with the interactive Web site design firm Rolling Orange in San Mateo, Calif.
I checked out the entry for Beethoven’s “Eroica” with the aid of Lisa Hanford Halasz, the site’s content consultant, who has a Ph.D. in music theory and is a former director of education at Carnegie Hall.
Click on the “Eroica” program and you can choose between exploring the score or learning more about Beethoven’s life and times. You can play the San Francisco’s Symphony’s vigorous performance of the work while following the score: a guide bar takes you from measure to measure. With a click on marked passages you can trace and hear motifs, themes and transitional figures, or investigate Beethoven’s use of keys.
Links quickly take you to short explanations of the musical materials by Mr. Thomas, who illustrates points at the piano. And so on. Or you can follow a timeline of Beethoven’s life, learn about his patrons, his deafness, his conflicted attitudes about Napoleon.
Working with the technicians at Rolling Orange, Ms. Halasz was a “stand-in for Michael Tilson Thomas,” she said, who conveyed his instructions as to what the site should be able to do. But she also got some helpful input from her 15-year-old son, Dan, who studies singing seriously but is not much interested in classical music.
As he watched Mr. Thomas explain some complex musical matter on the site, Ms. Halasz explained, Dan said, “That’s really cool, but how does he know that?” The Web site tries to answer this very fair question.
I must confess that as one of Uncle Lenny’s original young people, I most responded to the moments in the “Keeping Score” shows when Mr. Thomas simply sits at the piano, or takes charge on the podium, and explains it all. In the Stravinsky show we see scenes of a family concert at the San Francisco Symphony when the topic was “The Rite of Spring.”
At one point Mr. Thomas breaks down the meter-smashing rhythms in the crazed “Sacrificial Dance” that ends the ballet. He sings it as a series of grunts and squawks, then asks the orchestra to play it. It’s a moment right out of the Young People’s Concerts playbook; there is our long-awaited modern-day Bernstein.

Clarino · 11-05-2006, 03:42 PM

Wow! This is a fantastic idea! I really hope the BBC picks this up. If they don't perhaps C4 or Artsworld will.

I saw MTT give a lecture/recital on Eroica last year with the LSO (I think). It was very interesting. Hopefully we will get to see this series on this side of the pond.

Thanks for posting this Alex.

wiseone2 · 11-05-2006, 04:17 PM

I like the guy. I have only worked with MTT once. We performed and recorded Steve Reich's "Desert Music" back in the day. He was very easy to work with, and we hit it off..........we are both December 21 babies

Wilmer

Derek Reaban · 11-05-2006, 05:55 PM

Alex,

Thanks for posting this. I will certainly seek this out to watch with my family. I remember doing Beethoven 3 several years ago with the Mesa Symphony (and our new conductor Cal Stewart Kellogg). My 3 year old (at the time) wanted to hear my new iPod which had Beethoven 3 loaded in it, and when I put it on the last movement I made some fun gestures during the pizzicato section. He started giggling and kept wanting me to play this over and over for him (with the gestures of course)! Now, his very favorite composer is Beethoven, and he loves many of his symphonies (especically that movement of the third).

I'm sure we'll all enjoy what MTT has put together for this new generation.

Thanks!

11-05-2006, 07:50 PM

Eclipsehornplayer · 11-06-2006, 07:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wiseone2

I like the guy. I have only worked with MTT once. We performed and recorded Steve Reich's "Desert Music" back in the day. He was very easy to work with, and we hit it off..........we are both December 21 babies

Wilmer

Wow Wimer,

I'm honored to be in the neighborhood! (December 23)

KJaeger · 11-06-2006, 04:54 PM

I really liked the pilot episode on Tchaikovsky's Fourth (I purchased the DVD). I can see where they were a bit ambitious but I thought that MTT did a nice job with it - and I appreciated that the musicians in the orchestra were stars of the show just as much as Tilson Thomas.

Unfortunately, and inexplicably for a program that is geared towards young people, my local PBS affiliate is broadcasting the episodes Saturday morning at 1AM!

I mean, I'll certainly TiVO it, but wouldn't you put such a program on in early primetime or perhaps a weekend afternoon when school-age kids could watch??? Our local PBS station here in southern Colorado is pathetic when it comes to music programming anyway - I moved here from the San Francisco area and KQED was exceptional in that regard (not to mention braodcasting everything in beautiful high-definition).
I will have to write and let Rocky Mountain PBS know why they aren't getting my pledge this year

adohanian · 11-06-2006, 05:22 PM

I just saw the Beethoven this weekend and it was well done, and the playing and player interviews were great.

adam

11-05-2006, 01:18 PM	#1 (permalink)
Alex Yates Forte User Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Atlanta, GA Posts: 2,405	Keeping Score - "Updating Uncle Lenny" New series by Michael Tilson-Thomas. NYT article. Music Updating ‘Uncle Lenny’ for a Multitasking Age By ANTHONY TOMMASINI Published: November 3, 2006 Even before his career took off, the young Leonard Bernstein sized up television and thought, first, that it was potentially the greatest tool for general music education and, second, that he was the ideal television teacher. He was right on both counts. San Francisco Symphony In 1958, Bernstein, by then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, presented his first Young People’s Concert, which was televised nationally. The broadcasts continued for 15 years and have never been equaled. The field of classical music has long been waiting for some musician to come along who could use television with Bernstein’s galvanizing impact. The closest, it seemed, has been the dynamic maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, a natural who has masterminded some impressive shows. Until recently, though, TV had not been a central component of Mr. Thomas’s work. That has now changed. Mr. Thomas is the creative force behind a $23 million, five-year project titled “Keeping Score.” Developed by the San Francisco Symphony, where Mr. Thomas is in his 11th season as music director, “Keeping Score” comprises a series of PBS television shows, an interactive Web site, a series of radio broadcasts, documentary and live performance DVDs and a program for public schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, that is starting this fall in selected cities in California and Arizona. This ambitious project would not amount to much if it did not have the right communicator directing things. Mr. Thomas is that person, as the first three “Keeping Score” TV shows make clear. Last night various PBS stations began broadcasting the first 60-minute installment, which explores Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. (It will be broadcast in New York on Channel 13 at noon on Sunday.) Filmed in and around Vienna, where the “Eroica” was first performed in 1805, the show offers Mr. Thomas analyzing the work at the piano, discussing its impact and rehearsing it with his musicians. It still sounds revolutionary as played here with bracing energy, fleet tempos and incisive execution. Mr. Thomas takes on some lofty questions: What is heroic about the music? What did it mean to the composer, who was going deaf at the time he wrote it? How can a symphony titled the “Eroica” end with a finale that seems almost grotesquely comic? He also delves into the details of musical life in early-19th-century Vienna, with profiles of Beethoven’s patrons, rivals and enemies. The other two “Keeping Score” shows, which will also be shown on Sundays at noon on Channel 13, focus on Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (Nov. 12) and “Copland and the American Sound” (Nov. 19). Mr. Thomas understands that television and television viewing have changed radically since Bernstein’s day. The Young People’s Concerts were like engaging lectures with musical illustrations. Standing before the Philharmonic with a piano nearby, Bernstein was unslick, authentic and mesmerizing. He demystified music, playing excerpts, singing phrases in his gravel-pit voice, shuffling through his note cards and not caring that he perspired profusely. His topics were posed as sweeping questions: “What Does Music Mean?” “What Is a Mode?” “What Is Impressionism?” He expected his young people at home and in the hall to pay attention. Alas, as Mr. Thomas explained in an interview in New York in June, musical understanding — among young people and even most parents — has slipped badly since then. “The things Lenny assumes his public understands, even the words he uses — it’s tragic to compare it to today,” Mr. Thomas said. Though he hopes that youngsters will give the “Keeping Score” programs a chance, he said that of necessity his target audience was “families, young adults, parents with some interest who want to introduce their kids to music and talk about the programs together.” Consequently, though the discussion is carried mainly by the kinetic and articulate Mr. Thomas, who at 61 looks and acts half his age, the shows jump from shot to shot, person to person — the norm today. The balance between the “camera shot rhythm and the content rhythm,” as Mr. Thomas put it, is geared to engage viewers used to today’s quick-cutting techniques. A flutist is seen working at home on a tricky passage from the finale of the “Eroica.” Then the camera segues to the flutist onstage with the orchestra, playing that passage in context. One moment Mr. Thomas thumps out a brutal rhythmic figure from “The Rite of Spring” at the piano, and the next he is at the podium conducting the riff in all its terrifying orchestral incandescence. The shows are unlike the Young People’s Concerts in another way: “Lenny, God bless him, always assumed the position of the world’s foremost authority on everything,” Mr. Thomas said. Unlike Bernstein, Mr. Thomas draws on multiple voices. He wants diverse viewers to identify with the diverse musicians of the orchestra, some of whom are also engaging characters. There is a delightful scene, for example, when the boyish bass clarinetist Ben Freimuth describes the opening of “The Rite of Spring.” Starting with the bassoon playing the eerie opening melody, the wind instruments enter one by one, as if beginning a somber conversation. Soon, though, the oblivious bass clarinet intrudes with a growling, insistent riff, “like some meathead,” Mr. Freimuth says. You can imagine young viewers immediately getting the musical point. A pilot of “Keeping Score” was broadcast two years ago, with Mr. Thomas discussing and performing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. While very promising, the show attempted too much. It was both an explication of the symphony and a detailed explanation of how a performance is prepared, rehearsed and executed. The preparations showed everything, down to a detailed scene of an oboist shaving thin reeds from a block of bamboo. But the three shows that are officially kicking off “Keeping Score” are focused and cohesive. For young people who may find the shows too sophisticated, as well as for those who want to learn more, there is the Web site, keepingscore.org, which was developed with the interactive Web site design firm Rolling Orange in San Mateo, Calif. I checked out the entry for Beethoven’s “Eroica” with the aid of Lisa Hanford Halasz, the site’s content consultant, who has a Ph.D. in music theory and is a former director of education at Carnegie Hall. Click on the “Eroica” program and you can choose between exploring the score or learning more about Beethoven’s life and times. You can play the San Francisco’s Symphony’s vigorous performance of the work while following the score: a guide bar takes you from measure to measure. With a click on marked passages you can trace and hear motifs, themes and transitional figures, or investigate Beethoven’s use of keys. Links quickly take you to short explanations of the musical materials by Mr. Thomas, who illustrates points at the piano. And so on. Or you can follow a timeline of Beethoven’s life, learn about his patrons, his deafness, his conflicted attitudes about Napoleon. Working with the technicians at Rolling Orange, Ms. Halasz was a “stand-in for Michael Tilson Thomas,” she said, who conveyed his instructions as to what the site should be able to do. But she also got some helpful input from her 15-year-old son, Dan, who studies singing seriously but is not much interested in classical music. As he watched Mr. Thomas explain some complex musical matter on the site, Ms. Halasz explained, Dan said, “That’s really cool, but how does he know that?” The Web site tries to answer this very fair question. I must confess that as one of Uncle Lenny’s original young people, I most responded to the moments in the “Keeping Score” shows when Mr. Thomas simply sits at the piano, or takes charge on the podium, and explains it all. In the Stravinsky show we see scenes of a family concert at the San Francisco Symphony when the topic was “The Rite of Spring.” At one point Mr. Thomas breaks down the meter-smashing rhythms in the crazed “Sacrificial Dance” that ends the ballet. He sings it as a series of grunts and squawks, then asks the orchestra to play it. It’s a moment right out of the Young People’s Concerts playbook; there is our long-awaited modern-day Bernstein.

11-05-2006, 03:42 PM	#2 (permalink)
Clarino Mezzo Piano User Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Sheffield, England, UK Posts: 644	Wow! This is a fantastic idea! I really hope the BBC picks this up. If they don't perhaps C4 or Artsworld will. I saw MTT give a lecture/recital on Eroica last year with the LSO (I think). It was very interesting. Hopefully we will get to see this series on this side of the pond. Thanks for posting this Alex. __________________ "...you have the perfect C Major chord, with blazing trumpets and inaudible strings." - Daniel Barenboim.

11-05-2006, 04:17 PM	#3 (permalink)
wiseone2 Artitst in Residence Forte User Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Brooklyn,NY Posts: 2,366	I like the guy. I have only worked with MTT once. We performed and recorded Steve Reich's "Desert Music" back in the day. He was very easy to work with, and we hit it off..........we are both December 21 babies Wilmer __________________ Be sure Brain is engaged before putting Mouthpiece in gear. S.Suark 1951

11-05-2006, 05:55 PM	#4 (permalink)
Derek Reaban Mezzo Piano User Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Tempe, Arizona Posts: 616	Alex, Thanks for posting this. I will certainly seek this out to watch with my family. I remember doing Beethoven 3 several years ago with the Mesa Symphony (and our new conductor Cal Stewart Kellogg). My 3 year old (at the time) wanted to hear my new iPod which had Beethoven 3 loaded in it, and when I put it on the last movement I made some fun gestures during the pizzicato section. He started giggling and kept wanting me to play this over and over for him (with the gestures of course)! Now, his very favorite composer is Beethoven, and he loves many of his symphonies (especically that movement of the third). I'm sure we'll all enjoy what MTT has put together for this new generation. Thanks! __________________ Derek Reaban Tempe, Arizona

11-05-2006, 07:50 PM	#5 (permalink)
Dave Guest Posts: n/a	.. Last edited by Dave; 04-02-2007 at 05:48 PM.

11-06-2006, 04:54 PM	#7 (permalink)
KJaeger Pianissimo User Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Colorado Springs, CO Posts: 84	I really liked the pilot episode on Tchaikovsky's Fourth (I purchased the DVD). I can see where they were a bit ambitious but I thought that MTT did a nice job with it - and I appreciated that the musicians in the orchestra were stars of the show just as much as Tilson Thomas. Unfortunately, and inexplicably for a program that is geared towards young people, my local PBS affiliate is broadcasting the episodes Saturday morning at 1AM! I mean, I'll certainly TiVO it, but wouldn't you put such a program on in early primetime or perhaps a weekend afternoon when school-age kids could watch??? Our local PBS station here in southern Colorado is pathetic when it comes to music programming anyway - I moved here from the San Francisco area and KQED was exceptional in that regard (not to mention braodcasting everything in beautiful high-definition). I will have to write and let Rocky Mountain PBS know why they aren't getting my pledge this year __________________ - Kevin Jaeger Pikes Peak Philharmonic Colorado Springs, CO Last edited by KJaeger; 11-06-2006 at 04:56 PM.

11-06-2006, 05:22 PM	#8 (permalink)
adohanian Pianissimo User Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: boston Posts: 57	I just saw the Beethoven this weekend and it was well done, and the playing and player interviews were great. adam

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version Email this Page	Search this Thread: Advanced Search
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode

Unleash Your Anger
Copyright 2006 TrumpetMaster.com	All times are GMT -4. The time now is 03:06 AM. Powered by vBadvanced CMPS v2.2.0/Links 1.01 Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.7.2 Copyright ©2000 - 2008, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.0.0 RC8