Spring 2006

They struggle. They sweat. And note by note, the students and faculty of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival succeed in creating something beautiful. Glimpses from the last week of the festival's 49th season.

By Laura Barlament
Go to musical excerpts from the festival


When the students of last year’s Sewanee Summer Music Festival took their seats for Sewanee Symphony rehearsals, they must have trembled sometimes. That’s because when Maestro Victor Yampolsky, the festival’s 2005 artistic director, is displeased, he does not hold back. He cajoles. He berates. He mutters insults. He yells.
    But, he also loves those students, and they love him back.
    In this tension between frustration and love, between expectation and ability, between potential and actuality, the students and faculty at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival push each other, learn from each other, and create something beautiful. During five hot and sticky summer weeks on the Mountain, music students from all around the world come together and, under the tutelage of a dedicated and very talented faculty, play millions of notes and learn scores of works. The students and faculty together present 24 concerts in those five weeks. Surrounded by people who share their obsession with the demanding, thrilling world of classical music, these young people “get a taste,” as one longtime associate of the festival said, “of what music is all about.”

Prelude

    It’s Sunday evening, July 17, and time for the last weekly all-camp meeting of the 49th Sewanee Summer Music Festival. The festival’s nerve center, Guerry Hall, is a chaotic scene. In the lobby, the sounds and smells are reminiscent of a high school assembly. Students swarm around the boxes containing the weekly schedule and orchestral parts. The chattering and laughing continue in the auditorium. One young man is onstage at the piano, banging out some Gershwin. Small groups of acolytes surround various faculty members. Some students are perusing their new music for the week. One holds out her left hand, fingering and throbbing on an invisible violin neck.
    In the lobby Mark Savage, the festival’s managing director, yells, “OK, everyone inside.” He soon appears onstage, takes the mike, and announces, “Welcome to the last all-camp meeting!” There are “aw’s,” then applause. He hands over the mike to Maestro Yampolsky.
    A stooped man with gray hair, Yampolsky has a mischievous smile that upon provocation can quickly flip to a scowl. A native of Russia who came to the U.S. in 1973, he retains a distinctive manner of speaking English that turns “music” into “myoozeek” and neglects to use definite and indefinite articles.
    First, he congratulates them on the afternoon’s performances. Every student is assigned by ability and experience to one of the festival’s two orchestras — the Sewanee Symphony and Cumberland Orchestra — which give concerts every Sunday. The Sewanee Symphony’s accompaniment of SSMF faculty member Janet Sung on the Erich Korngold violin concerto was “magneefeecent,” he says, and the audience applauds.
    This week, he says, they have the busiest schedule of the summer: Besides their regular Sunday performances, the Cumberland Symphony has an additional concert in Monteagle, and the Sewanee Symphony is accompanying the con-certo competition winners. The repertoire is also most demanding: The Cumberland Symphony will be playing Wagner and Liszt and accompanying a trumpet concerto, and the Sewanee Symphony is taking on Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “The Titan.” So, Yampolsky announces, he has decided to give them a break and cancel the final weekly student chamber music concert.
    Some hiss, others cheer in response. “That’s my reason, that’s how it’s going to be,” says Yampolsky. “Now, collect yourselves to produce a performance you will remember for the rest of your life.”

Theme

    Each day starts with orchestra rehearsals: at 9 a.m. four days, at 8 a.m. two days; and on Sunday at 9:30 a.m.
    For the next 12–13 hours of each day, the students are in orchestra rehearsals, master classes, chamber music rehearsals, or lessons. Or, they practice. Rehearsals end Monday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, there are faculty concerts to attend or their own concerts to perform: A total of seven concerts that week.
    When asked what she expected her students would do with all she had taught them once they got home, flute instructor Patricia George said, “First I expect they’ll sleep for about a week.”

Like a Sound of Nature

    At 9 o’clock Monday morning, the Sewanee Symphony’s string section is in place on the stage of Guerry Auditorium to begin rehearsal of Mahler’s First. It’s a moment they have looked forward to since they arrived. “It’s just such an amazing piece. I’m pumped,” says violinist Bonnie Deeds, a music performance major at SUNY Fredonia.
    Perhaps the reason that a 21st-century college student can still find this music, written in the late 19th century, so exciting is that it is a portrait of Mahler’s own soul writ large, in 50 minutes of lurching emotional ups and downs, shot through with ironic quotations as well as earnest romanticism. “His idea of writing a symphony was outgrowth of search for his identity,” Yampolsky explains. Mahler was only 24 years old when he started the piece — a young musician in love with the art form and eager to prove himself in it, much like the students at the SSMF.
    While black formalwear is still the norm for concerts, flip-flops, T shirts, and shorts are standard for SSMF rehearsals. On the podium, Maestro Yampolsky — wearing flip flops himself — announces, “Welcome to the final week of Sewanee Summer Music Festival number 49.” A few of the students yell, “Woo-hoo!” And they get to work.
    He directs them to start several bars into the first movement. The cellos play a low, soft, mysterious repeated figure that ascends and ascends with each iteration: 1, 2, 3, tri-pe-let, 1, 2, 3, tri-pe-let.
    “Slowly, drawn out, like a sound of nature” is how the composer defined the tempo and style of this movement. Yampolsky calls it a “gigantic prelude or tone-color painting of nature, with mountains, birds, storms, thunder. It is filled with the joy of being alive and struck by the awesome nature around us, absorbed into it.”
    At least at the beginning here, it sounds fairly straightforward. Yet, as Yampolsky warns the students several times during the course of the week, “Mahler was not normal.” The Maestro has several things in mind when he makes this statement, but primarily he means that nothing in this music fits into the musical schema that these students have encountered before.    “These students are mostly equipped by a middle-of-the-road classical training,” says Yampolsky. “Their understanding of melodies, musical lines are preliminary and very square. With this kind of knowledge their un-derstanding of symphonies of Mahler is not quite sufficient.”
    In other words, these three hours of rehearsal are the beginning of a long journey. “I choose repertoire which is above their level but reachable,” Yampolsky tells me later. “So they can say ‘Wow, we did that.’ So there is possibility for them to feel accomplishment.”
    Back at the rehearsal, Yampolsky asks the cellos to play again. “You need to play one bar per bow because you’re a small section, for Mahler, and you need to produce more sound.” They play. They stop. In the end, it accelerates a bit. Play it again. And again. … (Go to musical excerpts from Mahler's First Symphony.)

Forte

    At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, the low brass section of the Cumberland Symphony — that is, tuba, bass trombone, and three tenor trombones, all guys — sit in Woods Lab 216, immersed in Liszt’s famous tone poem Les Préludes.
    Jamie Box, principal trombonist of the Montreal Symphony, is conducting the sectional. He directs them to the andante section. Rich chords fill the concrete walls. Cutting them off, Box asks the bass trombonist, Derek, “Why are you playing louder here?” Derek, who’s a rising high school senior from The Colony, Texas, says with impeccable logic: “I have ff [double forte] and back there it was f [forte].” “That’s a good answer,” Box replies. “But, no matter what, we have to go with what the group decides to play. Play at the volume the group decides. Later, you can suggest, ‘Hey, guys, this says double forte, I think we should play louder here.’”
    After a moment, Box — who lives, it should be noted, in Quebec — continues. “Who knows what forte means — in French?” “Strong?” someone ventures. “Yes. I know I’m getting a little philosophical here, but one of the things I’ve learned is that ‘forte’ doesn’t always mean loud. As a trombonist who has to count a lot of rests, I’ve thought about this a lot. I can make a chain saw loud, but I can’t give it that full, rich sound of a trombone.”
    They play the passage again. Later Derek tells me he started playing trombone in fourth grade, because a friend had an instrument that he let Derek borrow. “At first I taught myself, then I got some teachers, and now I’ve gotten to study with the principal trombonist of the Montreal Symphony, Jamie Box! I’ve learned so much in five weeks. I’ve absorbed so much information, my head is full to exploding. I can’t wait to go back home and show people what I’ve learned.”

Like a Sound of Nature, Continued

    At 9:40 a.m. on Wednesday in Guerry Auditorium, the Sewanee Symphony — with the full ensemble present — is again in the first movement of the Mahler. The music is soft and mysterious, with little cuckoos and twitters from clarinet and flute.
    Yampolsky stops and bursts out: “Don’t lose notes! You’re losing notes all the time!” He mutters something unintelligible. “Don’t lose notes!”
    They start again. Yampolsky cuts them off. “Flutes and clarinets, do me this favor. DO NOT PLAY BEFORE YOU LOOK AT ME!” He continues his rant in a mutter. “You have no idea. You’re children in a crib. You’re not ready. You don’t have the emotion, the know-how, and I don’t think you have the desire. … OK, let’s try it again from 16.”
    He stops. “It’s late! It’s late!” He claps and sings out the music.
    Then he rehearses harps and horns. The harps come in late. He stops and corrects them and has them play it again. “It’s not clean. I don’t hear clear notes.” Starts again, stops again. Another outburst: “Is that the way you play every-thing?! According to whatever?!”
    They play it again. He stops and says, “That’s good, excellent.” And starts the piece over, but stops right after a horn entrance. “What is your name?” From the back of the stage, someone says, “Paul.” “Paul,” Yampolsky says, “you must promise me to pick up new habit when you’re under my command. You must be ready! Not being ready is recipe for disaster! I do everything in my power to give you environment to make it work, but you must be ready!”
    The work goes on.

The Most Outstanding Studio

    At 2:05 p.m. the mellow sound of a clarinet ensemble insinuates itself from Woods Lab 238 into the hallway. A hand-written sign on the door proclaims:

    The dark, woody sound of a calmly flowing, Classical-style melody is punctuated by the steady toc-toc-toc of a metronome. Suddenly the music changes style. A lone clarinet plays repeated short notes. The room erupts in female laughter. They manage to restart with only occasional giggles bursting out. When the piece ends, someone comments, “I kind of like that.” “I do too. It’s just kinda long.” “That’s OK!”

Solo
  
     It’s 3:20 on Thursday afternoon. Tosha Knibb, a rising senior at the New World School of the Arts in Miami and section chair of the second violins in the Cumberland Orchestra, is standing barefoot in front of a mirror in a cramped office in Guerry basement, playing the first two notes of the Bruch violin concerto. G to B-flat: again, and again, and again.
    Between attempts, Thomas Moore — a longtime SSMF faculty member — gives a steady stream of corrections. “Lead with the elbow and the up bow,” he says. “Don’t bend your body when you do it. Feel the first finger on the up bow. Feel the little finger on the down bow.” G, B-flat; G, B-flat. Et cetera.
    “Now you’ve gotten the shift better, but you forgot your vibrato,” says Moore. She plays them again. “Imagine the orchestra support for what you’re playing.” She plays them again.
    “We’ve got to get beyond these two notes or you’ll never get interviewed again,” he jokes.
    It’s Knibb’s first summer at Sewanee, but she studies with Moore year round in Miami. By all appearances, they’re an odd couple: Her chocolate skin, hair in long cornrows, shy smile and quiet voice contrasts with his bald white pate, scruffy beard, and gruff demeanor. Yet the comfort level between them is obvious.
    He stops her again at a big shift. She needs to learn that interval, Moore says. “Measure it so that we really hear it,” he says. “Move your arm, not just your hand; don’t go beyond it; measure it, slide, slide! … Now make sure you hold it long enough.”
    “You’ve gotta be aware of absolutely everything.”
    They go on, he playing along with her. In such close quarters, the sound those two powerful violinists make is tremendous.
    When they come to another big stretch, he stops and shows me how small her hands are. Sometimes they develop alternate fingerings that fit her hand better. “But she’s very talented, and she makes up for it very well,” he says with obvious pride. “She manages,” he keeps saying, as if it always surprises him.
    At about 4, the next student comes in and plunks down on the couch while Moore finishes marking fingerings and bowings on the Bruch. Then he flips a couple pages and plays the beginning of the third movement — a minefield of double, triple, and quadruple stops (in other words, multiple notes played simultaneously and, in this case, fast). “That’s what you have to look forward to,” he says to his student with a mischievous smile.

Chamber Music

    At 3:30 p.m. on Friday, a small group of musicians from the Sewanee Symphony has gathered in the harp room, as the University Gallery is known during SSMF. The room is strewn with harp dollies and harp covers, cello cases, women’s black pumps, boxes, notebooks, music, and other assorted objects. An upright piano sits along a wall.
    These are a few of the students who refused to give up their last opportunity to play chamber music during this festival. They’ve arranged their own groups, reserved St. Luke’s Chapel for a Saturday afternoon performance, and are using their free time to rehearse.
    This group is working on Maurice Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet. There’s only one problem: They still need a cello player. The principal cellist in the Sewanee Symphony has injured her bowing arm. “It’s gone numb” she says, glumly. “I hope it gets better, because I really want to play the Mahler. It’s one of my favorite pieces.”
They discuss every possible cellist they could ask, from faculty members to students. They even talk about adapting the part for viola or contrabassoon, which makes them laugh. Finally, the injured cellist and the harpist go off together to track down somebody who’s willing to play.
    The others entertain themselves with fiddling around on their instruments and gossiping for a while, then decide to start practicing even without the cello part. After about half an hour of rehearsing, they finish the piece. “Well, God, we ended together, that was a miracle,” says the violist.

    Less than 24 hours later, the ensemble — complete with a real-live cellist — is performing the piece beautifully to a packed house in St. Luke’s Chapel.
    The underground recital turns out to have admirable breadth and variety. Besides the Ravel, there’s a Schubert piano impromptu arranged for string quintet by an SSMF student, Humberto Colon-Rivera, who’s a double bassist himself; the percussion ensemble “Three Dream Sequences” by Walter Ross — a series of short pieces that requires at least 10 in-struments and six performers; a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier; and Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutié for a harp quintet.
    “It’s because of the passion and dedication of these students that this concert happened,” says Elaine Barber, the harp instructor. “They scheduled the rehearsal, they typed the program, they made the posters. They wanted to make music so much, and they made this happen.”
    But the final number is the show-stopper: Bizet’s Carmen Fantasy for an octet of double basses. They have fun with the performance, wearing black-and-red costumes and introducing themselves dramatically with shouts of “España!” and “olé!” After all, eight double basses playing the toreador song and the habanera sounds a bit like eight elephants dancing the Nutcracker might look. When they finish, the audience claps and cheers, and someone tosses roses at them as they depart down the aisle.

Finale

    By 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, the musicians in Guerry Auditorium are ready, as Maestro Yampolsky said less than a week ago, to produce a performance to remember.
    The Cumberland Orchestra, first to perform, is onstage. Parents in the audience are waving and wielding videocam-eras. “I’ve behaved myself for five weeks,” says one mom. “Now it’s my turn to embarrass him. Maybe I’ll shout, ‘Mommy loves you!’”
    The concertmaster, a tiny girl with long blond hair, takes the stage to enthusiastic cheers. At SSMF, every concert audience is a little more keyed-up than anything you’ll see on the professional stage. James Fellenbaum, the energetic young conductor, bounds up to the podium, and the solo trumpet’s mysterious introduction to Wagners’ Rienzi overture gets the music started.
    The audience heartily applauds both the Wagner and the Hadyn trumpet concerto with the charismatic virtuoso Ryan Anthony, a former Canadian Brass member who served on the SSMF faculty this summer; but the orchestra saves its finest work for the Liszt. The audience gives them a long, exuberant ovation, during which the Sewanee Symphony players wriggle out of the auditorium to take their turn onstage.
    When the applause stops, the second-stand cellist, a young man with a big mop of curly hair, turns to the cellists behind him, smiles, and gives a thumbs-up.
    There’s another exuberant welcome for the Sewanee Symphony’s concertmaster and Yampolsky. And for the next hour, the musicians take us along on the journey they’ve been traveling all week, the culmination of their time here at Sewanee: Mahler’s wild amalgam of cheerfulness and melancholy; loud exuberance and sudden exhaustion; earthiness and refinement; goofiness and seriousness; irony and innocence — all these contrasting moods and moments, enclosed by the sounds of nature: birds calling, rain falling, thunder pounding, streams rushing, leaves rustling.
    It mirrors the Sewanee Summer Music Festival itself, in fact: This group of young musicians, bursting with passion and self-doubt and dedication and humor and intelligence and pride, meeting in this Arcadian wood, the Domain.

Coda

    By 4:45, people are packing up backstage. Digital cameras flash, and then the group huddles around the camera to admire their own image. Students and faculty are shaking hands and hugging. Others are lined up to shake hands and take pictures with Maestros Yampolsky and Fellenbaum. Students give each other big hugs — two girls rock back and forth, locked in embrace.
    As I leave, I see Derek the bass trombonist and Tosha the violinist walking away with their parents. The carillon is playing, birds are singing. The Sewanee Summer Music Festival is not over, though; it’s just going home, all around our world, until it comes together again next year for the 50th season of unfettered, top-notch music-making on the Mountain.

Go to musical excerpts from the festival.