For the below video, click on “Watch on Youtube”:

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra was known as the best pick-up band in the world: the musicians came together just for the festival each year, handpicked by the conductor, Claudio Abbado, from the best orchestras and ensembles in Europe (as well as some of the world’s best soloists, like clarinetist Sabine Meyer and flutist Emmanuel Pahud), brought together by a love of the music and a love of this particular maestro.

From what I’ve read, Abbado’s vocal instructions to the orchestra during rehearsals consisted almost entirely of one word: “Listen.”  To each other, to the music, to the space between the notes – “listen.”

That is something I am going to be encouraging you all to do this year: to listen.  To each other, to yourselves, to the silence between things.  This will require a certain mindset, one that we spent a lot of time exploring last year and that we will explore again in the months to come.  Grade 7s, remember Lynda Barry’s advice regarding attracting images – that it requires the same sense of calm friendliness one would use when faced with a shy forest animal that you wanted to encourage to come closer.  Recall Ogion the Wise, listening with his wizard’s ear to the trees and the rain and the mountain.

If you watch the Abbado video, you will see evidence of that mindset and you will see the deep listening that is happening, both on the podium and in the orchestra.  Notice he doesn’t use a score.  Practice + relaxation + openness is what we are after, and real, active listening is the clearest and surest path there.

For those who have the time and are so inclined, go for it: watch the whole thing. (And if you want to go deeper into your understanding of what Mahler was intending, take a look here – I had a better, more insightful link, but it has sadly disappeared…)

Please do watch the first opening minutes so you can see what I am referring to above, and so you can also see the wonderful sense of Abbado as Prospero, the sorcerer of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, casting his spell over the ocean of those strings.  And then skip to the very end (about 1:24:45) and watch how the musicians relate to each other after the performance – the joy and friendliness and pleasure they take in each other and what they have accomplished.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if our class ended like that?  Every day?