[Dixielandjazz] AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

[Stephen Barbone]

List mates:

Many times, we berate the "audience" for not coming out for OKOM, for
not understanding the music and we berate the kids for their musical
taste. We are not a.lone, the same thing happening for all forms of
older music.

Yet we "do" precious little about it.

The below article was in the NY Times in December 2003. It has some good
advice for those of us who would perpetuate the music. "AUDIENCE
PARTICIPATION. How we can do it is up to us, but let's by all means, do
it.


Listen Up! Insights From a Quirky Music Tutor

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

   In the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Robert Kapilow was
leading 200 audience members in a boisterous singalong of Beethoven's
piano sonata "Les Adieux," written after the departure of his patron,
Archduke Rudolph, as the French Army advanced on Vienna.

"Women, take the higher notes," Mr. Kapilow instructed from his seat at
one of two concert grands on the stage, his right hand striking the
work's plaintive three-note theme, his left arm raised to conduct.
Nearby, the pianist Wu Han sat posed to demonstrate excerpts from the
sonata on Mr. Kapilow's cue. "Now men, the lower notes."

A composer, conductor and lecturer, Mr. Kapilow says he is a man with a
mission: to lure audiences into concert halls across the country and
turn them into educated participants rather than passive spectators. For
much of the last decade, he has been touring with an exuberant aural
tapestry of history, composition and anecdote, called "What Makes It
Great?," designed to tutor audiences in the fine art of listening.

"As a mixed-media form (part lecture, part demonstration), the monologue
is part of theater tradition, from Mark Twain to Holly Hughes," Margo
Jefferson wrote in The New York Times. Mr. Kapilow, she said, "leaps
into the void dividing music analysis from appreciation and fills it
with exhilarating details and sensations."

Taking familiar pieces, both classical and popular, Mr. Kapilow uses
compositional theories and vigorous storytelling to deconstruct
melodies, harmonies, themes and motifs into the essence of a work's
appeal. Lectures, enlivened by audience participation and generally
raucous encouragement from Mr. Kapilow, end with a performance by a
soloist or orchestra of the complete work analyzed.

"Do you hear it? Do you hear that heartache?" Mr. Kapilow demanded
during his presentation of "Les Adieux" last month, nearly spiraling off
the bench. "I can see your faces in the light. Nod if you're with me,
folks. Yeah, you've got it? You've got it! Give yourself a hand." The
hall filled with applause.

Tomorrow, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan, as part of
Lincoln Center's Great Performers series, Mr. Kapilow will decode four
choruses from Handel's "Messiah" with help from the church's choir and
orchestra, coached by Kent Tritle, director of music ministries at the
church.

"Rob creates these `oh my God' moments," Mr. Tritle said. "He will get
inside the composer's mind and show how very simple compositional
materials became something very exciting and brilliant because of the
choices Handel made. I expect to see light bulbs going on all over the
place." (Mr. Tritle will conduct the full oratorio at the church on
Friday at 7:30 p.m. and a 90-minute "Family Messiah" featuring excerpts
on Sunday at 2:30 p.m.)

Mr. Kapilow finds inspiration for his musical elucidations in the
everyday: a song on a radio, perhaps, or a tune played by one of his
three children. "It really starts with the simplest thing," he said on a
recent evening in his home in River Vale, N.J., as he fidgeted in a
chair wedged between the Korg synthesizer on which he composes most
nights until 3:30 a.m. and a Roland piano. "I hear some piece of music
that I like and think, `This is really cool. How could I get this
across?' "

With his crinkly eyes, broad grin and a figure kept trim by a black belt
in karate and years as a tennis pro, Mr. Kapilow at 50 is like an
intellectual golden retriever: glossy, tireless and raring to chase
after anything resembling a musical bone.

Of his ability to detect the worlds of both Kansas and Oz in the octave
leap at the beginning of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," or the cry of a
hunting horn in the theme of "Les Adieux," "there's no one to blame but
me," he said cheerfully of the 90 "What Makes It Great?" programs in
which he has explained works ranging from Bernstein's "West Side Story"
to Chopin's G minor Ballade and Schumann's Piano Quintet. "There's no
book that you could read that says any of those things I come up with. I
do a lot of research. But the actual core, just coming to a piece of
music — I don't feel like I need anybody else's opinion. I've thought
about those pieces
for a long time."

Reared in New Rochelle, N.Y., Mr. Kapilow began piano lessons at 4,
violin at 6 and by 9 was setting poems to music when he wasn't twanging
on his guitar.

"Nowadays we have such separate categories for classical music, for
popular music," he said. "I didn't grow up that way. I played electric
guitar in rock bands, I played jazz and cocktail piano, and I played
Beethoven. And I didn't really know they were so different."

As a Yale sophomore, Mr. Kapilow leapt at the chance to study with Nadia
Boulanger, composition teacher to Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, at
her summer institute in Fontainebleau, France.

"At the end of the summer, in one of those key pivotal moments, she
said, `Kapilow, you have a great, great talent for music. No skills. You
stay with me, you get skills. You leave, you never get them,' " he
recalled. "And that day, I called up my parents and said, `I'm not
coming home. I'm moving to Paris.' It was a life-altering experience.
She's one of the people who gave you the kind of training Bach would
have gotten 200 years ago."

After a year Mr. Kapilow returned to Yale and then did graduate work at
the Eastman School of Music in Rochester before landing, at 23, an
assistant professorship and a job as conductor of the Yale Symphony
Orchestra.

For two months at the end of his five-year tenure, in 1983, he journeyed
nightly to Manhattan, where he conducted in the pit of the Broadway show
"Nine."

"On Broadway everything is thought of from the perspective of the
audience, whereas most of classical music's world lives on this side of
the footlights," he said.

In the 1980's, while moving among conducting jobs, and until the early
90's, when he concentrated on composing, Mr. Kapilow began to imagine he
could influence the way audiences listened. And then National Public
Radio broadcast a lecture at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan 12 years ago
in which he juxtaposed Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto ("That single
chord and then a massive cadenza. How weird!") against three obscure
period concertos, and asked him to discuss the works during
intermission. A day later he received a call asking him to come on
board.

But Mr. Kapilow was not content to leave his pied-piper's message
reverberating on the airwaves. "I tried to do any kind of event I could
to get people to `get it,' " he said of his experiments, which ranged
from family days with the New Jersey Chamber Music Society to
compositions based on children's literature. "I knew that if I could get
permission to set Dr. Seuss's `Green Eggs and Ham,' people would come
through the door for that who would otherwise never set foot in a
concert hall. And it's the only libretto in America that every kid knows
by heart. So when you set it to music, they would `get' what music can
do."

Likewise his "Citypieces," in which he creates works evoking historic
landmarks or pivotal events, like the Washington Monument or the
Louisiana Purchase. He is collaborating on his latest project, a
symphonic setting for the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, with Darrell Kipp of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, whose
libretto will relate the perspectives of the numerous American Indian
tribes that the explorers encountered.

"I asked, `How can I use this project to bring people in who would
otherwise not be there?' " he said.

"Vladimir Nabokov said a good reader is somebody who writes in the
margins, folds down pages, underlines — who has a conversation with the
book, rather than being a passive spectator," he went on. "And in a way
that's what I'm trying to do: to have the audience not be passive
spectators for a piece of music, but to engage in a conversation rather
than just sitting back and having it
happen to them."