Flex your Fossles?

Lukas Foss, a so-called ‘eclectic’ composer, is dead – and so my blogging debut with Ariana also begins with the death of a ‘brilliant man. (though, Lucas Foss doesn’t quite seem to measure up to Sir Updike) Lukas Foss is mediocre, and just that, but one paragraph in the New York Times article about him put quite the smile on my face and another – a typical biographical paragraph - made me realize something about what my own bio will look like when I die – and how wonderfully different it will be from most of the bios about musicians I have encountered.

Foss quotes “I conduct because I love to make love to the past. I think man has this need, and the need to discover the future as well. The more my own composition is busy with exploration and experimentation, the greater is my need to keep my tie with the past which made me a musician in the first place; my tie with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and Wagner and Verdi and Handel and Schubert.” That really is the joy of conducting. Sometimes I wander why I enjoy conducting so much and it must be that it is the closest I can get to making sweet love to the music I so long to be intimate with. Playing and performing isn’t quite the same for me because your body is physically helping you create the sound – so it doesn’t seem like it can be truly absorbed –it bounces off of you and back rather than flow through you and inside of you. Conducting doesn’t make me nervous or tense or over analytical – it just lets me dance, not to, but with the music. My experience is thus fuller, more intimate.

I think, too, that the conductor in the symphony setting is the last thing standing to prevent the concert hall from becoming a factory of robots where nobody moves and our ears are the only active part in listening to the music. The conductor is always up there dancing (even the stiffest of conductors) even if nobody else is moving. He recognizes that even the stiffest of musicians’ sound can be captured and bent and grooved to somehow and then transformed into something beautiful for the audience. At least, I like to think that I am capable of that as a conductor.

Another something I noticed was, like most composers and performers who are any good or well renowned, Foss started playing his instrument, the piano, at the age of 7 – knowledge that always makes me feel very far behind. I started singing young – but most children sing who can talk and I didn’t take it very seriously until I was about 19 or 20. And anyway in a world full of middle-aged white men who play “real” instruments and see pretentious ‘virtuosic’ improvisation as the highest form of musicianship – singing doesn’t seem like much should I ever want respect in the world of composition. And I didn’t start pianoing until college. Oi!

It will probably be hard for these guys to cope with my superiority when they discover I’ve been at it for half as long as they have. And now I find myself wandering what my New York Times bio will say when I die. I think it will be fantastic.