I'm not really a different musician and conductor than I was last week at this time.
I drove home Sunday morning, alternately listening to Puccini for work and JRB musicals for fun during those four hours, which is what I would always do in a car by myself.
I vocal coached developing theater musicians that I love all afternoon and evening, like every Sunday.
I hugged my kids and helped them get ready for their first day back to school the next morning.
I spent an hour score studying before I went to bed.
I did not have any great revelations, any change to my dedication, ambition, drive, practice and work habits -- yet I still cannot shake a "before and after" feeling.
I think my world is subtly changed: a little larger, and a little more beautiful.
Jason asked me, after I had spent three superlative hours immersed in his music and watching him conduct as if he were creating the music at that moment, "what did you hear?"
My actual responses at that moment would have made me sound like a sycophant. "A piece of Heaven." "Can I have three more hours... or days... or years... in that pit to hear more, please?"
Instead I asked about what I
didn't hear: marvelously re-orchestrated piano sections during the matinee that I didn't hear or see in the score during the evening performance.
"I was bored," he said. "Jumped on keys."
This is why I couldn't answer adequately then. Now I will try.
First of all, being able to hear every piece of the orchestration made it even more exciting and complex than I had heard before.
His uses of hemiola, planing, and counterpoint that seems unrelated but weaves together in unexpected ways are a theory geek's paradise. What I would give to spend a week or more with a full score in front of me!
I've always heard Ives in Parade -- but maybe because I'm immersed in Madama Butterfly right now, I felt there were Italian operatic influences to Bridges. For two reasons: First, the orchestra seems to be a narrator. Sometimes it agrees with the characters and sometimes it goes deeper to show us more than what they are saying. I always hear this in Puccini. This narrative quality makes the listener feel even more vulnerable and exposed when it disappears for the a cappella moments. We have become accustomed to many voices, many stories being told, and in these moments there is only one.
Second, the cadences -- no big, showy "buttons" that announce the end of a song and tell the audience, "time to clap!" Instead, even the biggest "numbers," though the lack of traditional production numbers maintains the chamber piece feel, end instead with a special quieting -- unique, beautiful, and unsettling, always a foreshadowing that this story doesn't have any satisfactory endings. I hadn't noticed how these cadences shaped the show before -- such brilliant subtlety!
In the pit I was immersed in the orchestrations, but since voice was my first instrument I've always noticed how much Jason seems to love singers, and we love singing his work. Some composers give us hurdles to overcome, vocal writing that may be sublime music but doesn't match what each voice type's instrument naturally does well -- like great trombone writing forced on a violin section. But his vocal writing sits well in each voice, and the arrangements for ensembles do this for each part -- so not only is the actual writing a miracle, but the way the parts lie in the voices bring an elevated clarity and brilliance to the part writing that is just a joy.
I'm not a musical snob -- I enjoy almost every genre for what it is and can have fun listening to a good pop song or a Ligeti etude, so it is not a value judgement to say that much modern theater music seems to me to be simple and catchy -- easy to swallow for audiences who have enough complexity in their day-to-day lives. However, Jason defies that trend and always lets the listener be challenged. I hear and learn something different every time I listen to this score or play through the vocal selections, and I don't know when I will have exhausted that. I think in a hundred, two hundred and more years his work will have stood the test of time and be part of music schools' canon and more beloved even than now, especially considering the fact that his subject matter is so often courageous and challenges the audience and the culture they come from.
This is not part of the "what did you hear," but as a pit conductor, "what did you see" is important to me as I continually develop my gestural vocabulary. I love watching and learning from elegant and descriptive conducting. I will definitely be lifting a certain left-hand arc that brings a lovely development of a phrase to the string section!
Watching Jason conduct his own music was beyond that, however. He is a lovely conductor, no doubt. Very different from others I emulate. My best description is stolen from a lyric: "...how to describe his hands? So tense and so easy, so controlled but unpredictable-- the tornado of his eyes shining bright -- finding light." To see what sections were that light, to see what moved him moved me to tears at times.
And re-living the experience moves me to tears again. I'm undoubtedly an easy target for that, but still, I am incredibly grateful to Jason for this experience and to the friend that set it up for me. So there is the answer that took a week.
"What a gift -- and what a blessing!"
