What Lies Beyond The Stars

It’s Tuesday, November 14th, 2023, around 8:30 am, and I’m in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, terminal 2. I’m facing a blank white wall as I allow my devices to recharge after my flight. I arrived here a few hours ago from the Guarulhos Airport in São Paulo, Brazil, and will fly back to my home in North Carolina in just a few hours. Last week, I played two concerts in Belo Horizante with Roberto Tibiriçá and the wonderful Orquestra Filarmônica de Minas Gerais. The repertoire was Yoshimatsu’s rarely played soprano saxophone concerto and Villa-Lobos’ Fantasia for soprano saxophone, strings, and three horns. On my way to Minas Gerais, I lost my passport, which was the catalyst for a series of events that had nothing to do with music - just trying to make sure I could get home. 

Anyway, I just finished watching the newest release from the Living the Classical Life show, hosted by Zsolt Bognar. This YouTube-based show is one of my favorite places to find inspiration. When I saw there was a new release, I had to watch. This episode featured Kent Nagano, renowned conductor and former music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. It inspired me to write a blog post for the first time in a few years. 

Maestro Nagano shares a lot of wisdom in the half-hour episode, but one story resonated with a particular vehemence with things that have been on my mind over the past few years. He recalled a specific concert with Leonard Bernstein conducting Brahms’ First Symphony:

“Watching Maestro Bernstein conduct, it was obvious that it was happening at the moment. There was no real obsession to try to control every single moment that was happening. It was having the eye at a much higher level. That performance was so powerful that everyone in the house was weeping openly. It was just emotionally and spiritually far beyond what we could control, so we were just weeping. The orchestra members were so caught up that they could only applaud at the end of the performance. So, six months later, I heard that that performance was going to be transmitted on the radio. I circled the calendar date and really wanted to listen to this great performance on the radio, and it just was not the same. You heard all of the technical imperfections, it was a live performance. When you take a lot of risks in a live performance, a live-streaming can’t capture the intensity of risk-taking. It can’t capture the radiance of charisma and the power of spontaneity.”

This story, as well as many others I’ve heard about performers from previous generations, makes me wonder how the greats of the past would make sense of the classical music world today. What if the Leonard Bernstein’s of the world had started their careers in the days of YouTube, Instagram, paid digital subscription services, and recorded everything, all the time? Would their transcendence be recognized? Would they have cut through the noise in this current musical climate? Obviously, their legacies span far beyond any one performance, but nonetheless the question remains…more so as a hypothetical one to ponder.

In today’s classical music world, it feels as though we prioritize capturing concerts for unlimited consumption, rather than understanding that the magic is in the inexplicable nature of a shared moment in the same space. No matter how many microphones or camera angles there are, we can not capture it. Having started the current phase of my career at the beginning of the COVID-19 era, I am particularly sensitive to this. 

Even if I’ve never played a piece before, someone has to take a short video from rehearsal to post online as a promo for the concerts. Concerts have to be live streamed. We need video recordings to send to presenters. The algorithms reward consistent video content on social media. So much of what one does is on display digitally, and perhaps we forget that the art of classical music, as I love it, is not present on social media…or really in any recorded medium. A digital representation of something so human is no substitute. Cameras and microphones are everywhere during concerts, and it’s just expected that you play as if they’re not there, but I find this impossible. I instantly become hyper-aware that what is being captured is the side of music which is not of a higher spiritual or emotional plane. 

It’s so easy for us as performers to start striving solely for technically “perfect” recordings as opposed to adventurous, informed, spontaneous interpretations that are exciting and keep the audience on the edge of their seats. It feels like this is why we don’t improvise our cadenzas anymore, allow ourselves to experiment with new ornaments on the fly, or think of interpretive ability as being of greater importance than technical accuracy. 

This is utterly exhausting to me. I fell in love with the spiritual aspects of music. I fell in love with the feeling that the divine was able to express itself through this art form. I fell in love with feeling the presence of a higher power in a shared moment of beauty. The reality of being a musician often feels so far from this, and it breaks my heart. The question I ask myself almost daily is “what do I do with this realization?” If this is what it is to be a professional classical musician in the 21st century? The divine shows itself so infrequently because the circumstances do not give it the room to exist.

Kent Nagano also recalled a quote from Gunter Wand, legendary conductor:

“Usually I don’t achieve the level that I should. It only happens occasionally, I sometimes have a feeling that maybe a special moment has arrived. Do you know how I know that little moment has come? For a half a second, I am allowed to see what lies beyond the stars.”

Anyway, back to today…

Later this week, I will perform a recital in South Korea as a part of the Sejong Soloists’ Hic et Nunc Festival. The repertoire will be Paul Creston’s saxophone sonata, Robert Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces, Op. 73, Demersseman’s Fantasy on an Original Theme, a new arrangement of my composition Come As You Are for tenor saxophone and chamber orchestra, and Pedro Iturralde’s Pequena Czarda. Then I will fly from South Korea to Boston for my debut set of concerts with the Boston Symphony. We will play Tomasi’s concerto for alto saxophone. Then I will go to South Bend, Indiana, to do a week of community engagement events with the Kenari Quartet in which we have to perform a memorized and musically-enhanced rendition of a children’s book called “My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World” by former professional football player Malcom Mitchell. Earlier this month, I gave the west coast premiere of Billy Childs’ amazing concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Diaspora, with the San Diego Symphony and Rafeal Payare. 

While this all sounds exciting, it’s very difficult for me to feel that myself. I’m tired. Yes, physically tired, but more so that kind of tiredness that leads to burnout. Tired because it feels impossible for the music to ever reach its full potential. Will we see beyond the stars even once? Will the circumstances allow us to do our best?

On a more practical level, when touring, it’s almost impossible to find places to practice. Practice is essential and important for everyone, of course. For a reed player of multiple instruments on the road, however, practice is a necessity not only for the musical and technical side of things, but also because reed break-in and maintenance requires playing on said reeds consistently. When you’re expected to have your best sound on four different instruments, doing reed work the right way should take a very substantial amount of time. Having a good reed on soprano today has no bearing on what your tenor reeds will be like tomorrow. 

When there IS a place to practice, sometimes the process of getting there takes all of the mental energy you had left after traveling and the practice is not productive. Or sometimes you're practicing on stage just as the lighting people for the hall have decided to do their routine test of the lighting capabilities, so you’re just doing your best to focus during an extensive light show. Or the room you’re given to practice in is next to other practice rooms that are so loud that you can’t even hear the drone that you were going to work on your intonation with. Somehow, even at the highest level, people often do not expect you to need to practice, and it always seems to be a novel and bothersome request to have a quiet place to practice for the performance(s) they’ve hired you to give. 

Beyond my own need to practice, rehearsal time is always so incredibly limited. With orchestras, you usually have one rehearsal and a dress rehearsal the day of the concert. In chamber music situations, sometimes it’s similar, sometimes a bit more. Either way, it’s always baffled me how it can be expected that anyone can make a profound musical statement without giving the musicians time to discuss and experiment. We speak about classical music in such grandiose terms, and then expect these amazing feats of humanity to come together in one rehearsal? It’s not inspiring to me to be under rehearsed. It’s not inspiring to leave it and just see what happens. 

So, what is a young musician to make of this? Well, honestly, I have no idea. It often feels like an incredibly lonely pursuit, but I know many others experience. I wish we could talk about it more as a profession, but we are all often so busy and on the move. I did just recall a wonderful quote from one of my heroes, Andre Watts, when asked what advice he would have for young musicians in an interview a few years ago. He said:

“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have. It is private and sacred, and something you need to protect. When you’re young, you think that kind of thing is untouchable because it’s yours and nothing will sully it, but the dross of everyday life is very powerful and very strong, so you need to protect your special relationship with the music. It becomes, ultimately, a very safe haven where you can go and have the ultimate freedom of self expression. Protect that place.”

I DO know that I still love music so much. The chance of seeing beyond the stars, even for a brief moment, makes me want to keep pursuing this singular art form. Only time will tell what comes next. For now, I continue to learn each day and hope that I can keep reaching higher while bringing others with me for the ride.