Core Course Revives Historic 'First Nights'

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November 18, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

By Andrea Shen
FAS Communications

Music Professor Thomas Kelly discusses the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with members of the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra before the group performs for Kelly's First Nights class. Photo by Kris Snibbe.

During a recent performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the conductor, a dynamic figure in a severe black tunic, swept his arms in long wavy motions, stabbed a forefinger downward, and made a clenching gesture, palm upward, to call for more volume. Light glinted off the walnut brown, the tawny orange, and the deep cherry wood of the string instruments. When the string players leaned in to turn the page, their bows dipped in unison, and the orchestra looked like a single organism contracting.

"It’s not just an aural experience, it’s a visual experience," says William Geha, head teaching assistant for Professor Thomas Kelly’s Core course First Nights. "You see the performers sweating, you see them working, you see the choreography on stage. In a live performance, not only are you able to hear all of the music much better, you just feel embraced by it, you feel a part of it."

The Handel & Haydn Society’s visit to First Nights two weeks ago was not only a "first night" in itself – the orchestra’s first collaboration with a university – but an illustration of Kelly’s belief in the power of live music.

"Music happening in real time is very different from music happening on a CD," Kelly says. "I want students to understand how exciting it is when music actually happens."

The Past Comes to Life
In First Nights, Kelly reconstructs the social, historical, and cultural context in which five famous pieces of music premiered. The Handel & Haydn Society’s performance attempted to replicate the experience of Viennese concertgoers during the Ninth Symphony’s premiere in 1824.

Handel & Haydn, founded in 1815, specializes in "historically informed performance." The group plays baroque and classical repertoire using period instruments and techniques.

Their string instruments have gut strings, not steel. The trumpets have no valves. The horns, also valveless, have attachable coils of tubing that determine the key of the instrument. The violins and violas have no chin-rests, and the cellists grip their instruments between their legs, with only their ankles to keep the instrument off the floor.

Because of the way the instruments are built, the orchestra also plays at a lower pitch than modern orchestras: the "A" note is tuned to 430 vibrations per second, rather than 440.

"It’s not so much a sleek high-powered engine," says Mary Deissler, executive director of Handel & Haydn. "It’s a warmer, throatier kind of sound."

The Ninth symphony, Beethoven’s last, is a "Titan of classical music," Kelly says. Almost twice as long as most symphonies, it has a ponderous opening, a sprightly second and then slow third movement, and the famous, hymnlike "Ode to Joy" theme in its last movement. This symphony served as the template for the first compact disc ever created, Kelly says. Sony insisted that a CD be able to hold Beethoven’s Ninth on one side.

Students listened intently during the performance.

"It was amazing to watch people play the 32nd notes," freshman Laura Durso commented afterward. Kara Leehive, a junior, noted "the intensity of the music at different points – it was really nice to hear it, but also to see it in the player’s faces."

Lowell Greer, French horn player in the orchestra, describes "the covenant" between orchestra and audience – "that we will play and they will listen" – a pact often violated when people listen to CDs. "With a CD, you can turn it up or down, you can make it background music, you can be totally indifferent to it. But it is indifference which is the enemy of art. You hear about performers who get booed. But I don’t know of any musician who wouldn’t rather be booed than be ignored."

Jane Starkman, a violinist, says, "Audience reaction is always a part of the experience. You feel their excitement and it makes you feel more excitement. You work a little bit harder. When you’re performing in a live situation you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s never the same way twice."

In his 1786 poem "Ode to Joy," which serves as the text of the Ninth Symphony’s last movement, Friedrich Schiller writes: "Your spells reunite/that which was strictly divided by convention; all men become brothers/where your gentle wing rests."

The "brotherhood" between First Nights and Handel & Haydn stems from a shared interest in keeping classical performance alive.

"It can’t be any better exposure for us, the chance to get hundreds of bright students exposed to music," says Handel & Haydn’s Deissler. "We hope that wherever they end up, they take away an appreciation of classical music and they support their local symphonies."

Kelly, too, wants to cultivate future audiences for live classical music. "We are better people for being on a planet that has music on it. What would a life be without that kind of joy?"

In a few weeks, Handel & Haydn will return to First Nights, to perform part of Hector Berlioz’s "Symphonie Fantastique."

Alexander Thayer, in his biography Life of Beethoven, describes a moment of "joy" at the Ninth Symphony’s premiere. The composer was already quite deaf by this time.

"[W]hen at the end of the performance the audience broke into enthusiastic applause, he remained standing with his back to them. Then it was that Caroline Unger [an alto in the chorus] had the presence of mind to turn the master towards the proscenium and show him the cheering crowd throwing their hats into the air and waving their handkerchiefs. He acknowledged his gratitude with a bow."

French horn player Greer says music can foster social harmony.

"If we listen to music that has meaning to it, where the sounds within the piece represent good and evil, if the dissonant is resolved in the consonant, if there is balance in the form and the structure of it, if the sounds are harmonious, if the tone qualities are not strident, what an easy way to elevate your life," he says.

"We’ve never had a culture in the history of the world without music. I think it’s a basic and important part of us, and when our music becomes violent, we become violent; when it becomes amoral, we become amoral. To a certain extent, art reflects society, but I think more than reflecting it, it formulates society."