Musical Catch-22

Hello my friend(s - I hope). I write to you tonight on the edge of my seat with nerves. This Sunday at 7:30pm is the UMBC Symphony Fall concert. It's featuring a performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. This piece has been brutal to my face every rehearsal and I am quite nervous about being able to sustain through it and survive. It's ironic that I would use the word survive with this piece. Shostakovich was trying to do just that when he composed the work. He was trapped in the most outrageous story of a musical catch-22 of which I have ever heard.

I guess I should explain what I mean by a musical catch-22. Musicians, especially those who make a career of it, are always in an on-going battle between playing or writing what they like against playing or writing what will make them money. So you can be happy and broke, or miserable, and not quite as broke. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. For example, I hate playing church services normally because the music is drab, the directors tend to take themselves and their choir of ten old people way too seriously, and the pay is then low because they try to make you feel guilt for charging a church for their services. But it's pay. (To churches like that, remember you hired me, not vice-versa. You'd pay my brother to fix a clogged toilet so you pay me to make people not sleep during your sermons. Anyways, this is about to break my rule of no personal feelings so I better stop.) Last Christmas, I had come close to finding that happy medium. We had decent pay, a cool director and we got to play some of our own arrangements. That was a bit of luck on our part. Shostakovich fixed his musical catch-22 with with a stroke of genius, and a slight shot of luck. Here's the brief background to this piece.

Shostakovich's previous composition, an opera, was a real stinker to the Soviet officials. See, even the arts were monitored in Communist Russia. If a piece was seen as insulting to the Russian people, it was struck down, and sometimes even the composer would vanish. So Shostakovich had a major patron, a guy paying him to write music. After the opera, they tagged a leaky treason charge on the guy, and before he knew it, he was in front of the firing squad. Shostakovich's friends had also started to disappear after meeting with some government officials. So, here is Shostakovich, who loves to write cynical parodies of Nationist marches and incorporate them into his work and insult the Stalin regime. He needs to write a piece that doesn't do that so he doesn't find himself in Siberia, but he can't compromise his artistic integrity and feeling that as a human, he has the right to speak out. He also has to write to make money, but also to not just disappear. So he now has the granddaddy of all musical catch-22's.

Shostakovich at this point, even has fellow composers watching over his compositions and assisting him. This is where he demonstrates his genius (besides when you hear the performance this Sunday at the UMBC Recital Hall). He starts looking back at the music of one of his heroes, Gustav Mahler. Shostakovich was being told to simplify his music. Mahler was the master of taking something extremely simplistic and growing it into a massive work of majestic proportions. So, Shostakovich takes this concept, and mixes it with ambiguity. He establishes a simple theme of minor sixths that even reduces itself in a few bars, to three short repeated notes, reminiscent of Beethoven's Fifth. This simple motif of repeated notes carries you through the whole symphony. Shostakovich works in his march parodies, but they are more subtle. The Communist regime hails them as great Nationalist marches while the audience hears a march that is almost childish. The Communists heard Shostakovich rebuilding himself as a "Soviet Composer" while the public heard his rebirth as a more subtle satirist and related to the pain the government had put him through. He had done it. Not only did he write a successful piece that both sides liked, he didn't find himself in the goulag after writing it.

In no ways do I think any of us could ever relate to Shostakovich's amazing tale of thumbing his nose at Stalin and making Stalin like it. But I feel his pain. This performance leaves me in a catch-22 of sorts. Every other day, while on the treadmill, I burn calories to this amazing piece. I listen to a recording I got from the library of Leopold Stokowski pounding the London Philharmonic through this piece of ambiguous satire. I listen to their brass and strings both duel the incredibly challenging parts. I almost think Shostakovich wanted to put the performers through the strife that he was facing. But I listen, and I hear the big money maker pros make mistakes. This piece, in itself, asks the performer to make a deadly choice. Do you go for perfection, or do you go for energy? The piece is forty-five minutes long and the brass gets the third movement off. But the demands when playing are very high. The parts are intense, and normally extremely important. I know a lot of you would be asking, "Well Rich, all orchestra trumpet parts are like that, why is this one so critical?" My answer isn't going to be clear. Just know that it is very different. When looking at the part, and listening to the piece as much as I have, you can tell Shostakovich knew exactly what he wanted. How do I sound triumphant, yet mocking, but precise, bold, and chilling? This piece, unlike the marathon that is Tchaikovsky's 5th, or Howard Hanson's virtual horn and trumpet concerto that is his 2nd symphony, it requires a trumpet player to play with almost reckless abandon. You need to just put your sound out there. You can't take a single second of this symphony off. My stand-partner and I are trading some parts back and forth to avoid complete exhaustion, but this piece was written to exhaust. When I'm not playing I still have to follow along as if I am playing otherwise the ideal of the piece is lost. This is the first piece I've played in symphony that I learned more about from listening, than rehearsing. The London Philharmonic didn't get all the right notes. Neither did the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. But this is the great catch-22 that Shostakovich created when he wrote the piece that solved his own problem. And it makes you ask yourself as a musician, what do you hope to achieve in your playing when posed with the choice? Right notes or the right feeling? All the recordings I could find of this piece are live. None of them made in a studio. What does that portray to you? That the audience is needed? The energy required to convey this piece can only be captured in the concert hall? One music critic said that the piece unifies the audience and then takes them on a collective emotional wave. I think it does that for the performer as well. In this case, what do you really do? You can only rehearse the tough parts so much before they kill you. The rehearsals have the brass section frothing at the mouth for the conductor to not stop us in rehearsal. I think this means we're ready to make our choice. You may ask what my choice is in this situation? Well, for the struggle that Shostakovich endured to give the world this magnificent piece, I'm going to give him everything I've got. I'll meet the rest of you on the lower right hand side of the page.