the virtues of an omnivorous musical diet OR take the money and run OR how i finally enjoyed atonal music

Spending your summer at Interlochen is awesome. There are all kinds of music everywhere on campus to digest and nothing has made this more evident than the last 2 days.

First of all, last night I saw the Steve Miller Band in concert at Interlochen's 4,000-seat auditorium right next to the lake...and it was soooo good. I heard this stuff growing up and watching songs like Take the Money and Run, The Joker and Space Cowboy gain the immediacy of a live performance was awesome. He even invited some Interlochen students up to jam on stage with the band. How cool is that!

My parents decided to take a few days of summer vacation and make the drive from Minnesota to visit so I was able to sit next to them during the proceedings. Papa Shank introduced me to classic rock ("introduced" is probably not the right term, though...more like force fed me the stuff until I head-over-heels fell in love with it) and seeing him have such a great time made my experience at the show even better.





















The show I saw the day before was the preview performance of Chris Thile's mandolin concerto with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra. To say this was an incredible two hours of music making is selling it short completely.

For those of you who don't know CT, he was the mandolin player for the band Nickel Creek (I had never heard of them until I saw this concert) and experiments with pretty much every genre there is. Maestro Jung-Ho Pak called him "a proponent of the mandolin as a virtuostic instrument" and I couldn't agree more (think Béla Fleck but with a mandolin). Interlochen has co-commissioned this concerto and, for this concert, they previewed the first movement, "Is It a Sharp Fourth or a Flat Fifth?"

Now, a couple things need to be noted before I get to the actual performance:

1. The title of that movement suggests--at least to me--that it will be a tonal piece.
2. Immediately preceding the concerto performance, he played a Bach partita on the mandolin (this was so good I almost cried).
3. It's a mandolin! Throwing out your preconceptions about this instrument isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

However, what he wrote was almost completely atonal and incredible and I've never been so riveted by a performance on this instrument. I think the mathematical atonality of what they were playing combined with how we are taught to engage the "usual" music played on that instrument completely threw me off and made me listen in a way I haven't been capable of in a while. My being surprised by music is not something that happens very often (not bragging here...it's just what I went to school for) and I really appreciate it when someone can drag that out of me.




















The concert was bookended by Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" (the sturdiest piece I've ever heard built out of such simple material) and "Appalachian Spring" (how 'bout that final chord, right?) and made me realize that going to symphonic concerts really bores me unless it's something innovative like this.

On a side note: I think this is a problem with the repertoire and not the ensembles or conductors. Orchestral pieces are way too long and there is too much "classic" rep to slog through before you get to something that you've never heard. But that's another post...

So, in summation: cheers to Interlochen, Steve Miller, Chris Thile and Jung-Ho Pak with a special commendation to atonal music. I'm going to go listen to some mandolin music that I just procured from iTunes.