Most people grow up loving the pop music of their time. As they get older, they might reach out and take a chance on jazz or try world music.
But mention classical music, and their defenses go up. Images of tuxedoed performers, stuffy halls and uncomfortable seats come to mind, not to mention works that seem to drag on forever.
In an ambitious new San Francisco Symphony project, which traverses television, radio and the Internet, famed conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is trying to dispel such misconceptions and turn new audiences on to the form.
“The large mission of the project is to let more people feel close to classical music, without in any way kind of simplifying or dumbing down what classical music is about, because I think what’s so extraordinary is its directness and its complexity,”
Thomas said from his Miami home.
“Part of my big message with all this is that if you are alive, you know all you need to know about the message of classical music, because more than any other music, it is about the way life really is.”
The five-year project, titled “Keeping Score: Revolutions in Music,” is funded in part by a $10 million challenge grant from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. It is one of first attempts in classical music to bridge old and new media in such a far-reaching and innovative way.
“I really do believe in the possibilities and potential of these different media to be used for the arts and the for the communication of the message of the arts,” Tilson Thomas said. “We have to begin to work in these areas and develop it so there will a future to this.”
Tilson Thomas enjoys, in many ways, an ideal position to undertake a project of this kind. The respected conductor is one of the most successful protégés of conductor Leonard Bernstein, a master communicator whose televised “Young People’s Concerts” set a standard for educational outreach in classical music.
Tilson Thomas has undertaken several groundbreaking audience initiatives in San Francisco, including the orchestra’s 12-concert American Mavericks festival. He is also founder of the New World Symphony 2000, a pre-professional training orchestra in Miami.
“Keeping Score” has three main components:
Television series (same title as the overall project). The first three episodes were broadcast in November on public television and are available on DVD at shopsfsymphony.org and elsewhere. Sales have already reached 3,500 units.
These programs, which so far have focused on Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and Aaron Copland’s body of work, talk less about theory and harmony and more about the emotional, historical and cultural underpinnings of the music.
The episode devoted to the “Eroica” Symphony, one of the pivotal works in the history of classical music, intercuts a loose biography of Beethoven, including segments shot in key locations in Austria, with discussions of the work itself, with excerpts of rehearsals and a performance.
Besides providing the “back story” of the piece itself, Tilson Thomas also wanted to provide insights into the creation of a performance of the composition today, providing opportunities for some of the San Francisco Symphony musicians to share their views.
While the program includes some formal voiceovers, much of the time, the conductor talks informally from the piano keyboard.
“I wanted to be conversational, so I did not work from a script,” he said. “I worked from an outline of the points that I wanted to cover. Then I just spoke this directly to the camera.”
“The MTT Files.” In this series, which will be broadcast on public-radio stations in early 2007 (but not on Colorado Public Radio) and streamed online, Tilson Thomas discusses everything from training musicians to what makes American music American.
At the same time, he interviews such guests as famed prima ballerina Natalia Makarova and even travels to Georgia to talk to soul and funk legend James Brown.
“I’ve been a tremendous fan of his forever,” Tilson Thomas said. “So, it was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with him and talk about music and just point out some things happening in his music and make him realize how many things he is exploring are things which have been explored by people such as Stravinsky and others.”
Keepingscore.org. Anyone interested in delving deeper into classical music can log onto the project’s interactive, user-friendly website, which has a separate “companion site” for each of the three television programs.
“In the television show, I may mention an idea in passing, like Beethoven moves through many different keys in his pieces,” Tilson Thomas said. “Why? Because these keys have specific meanings to him.
“On the website, you can actually go to that as a landscape and explore specifically what kind of music Beethoven wrote in these different keys and what he said about those keys. You can reach your own conclusions.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
