The South Carolina Philharmonic's website is back up and running, so this is a follow-up to my post of a couple days ago. A glance at the seven finalists for the post of Music Director will, I think, confirm for you some of the points I was trying to make earlier. One extremely promising sign: the coming season includes works by four of the biggest names in contemporary music: John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, and the late Gyorgy Ligeti. Of course, these are all fairly short concert-opening works but you have to start somewhere.

Kevin Fisher is the president of Fisher Communications, a Columbia advertising and PR firm. He was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor last year, losing to the incumbent, Bob Coble, and he also contributes occasional op-ed pieces to the local paper here (The State), and frequently to the alternative paper here in town, the Free Times. Fisher wrote a heartfelt but puzzling column in last week's Free Times, criticizing the decision last year by the Board of Directors of the South Carolina Philharmonic not to renew the contract of Music Director Nicholas Smith, whose 14-year tenure in that position has just ended with his most recent performances with the orchestra at the Columbia Festival of the Arts. Fisher feels that Smith got a raw deal, saying that "under [Smith's] leadership the Philharmonic has significantly enhanced its reputation, its attendance and its impact on the cultural life of Columbia."

I'm not here to disagree or agree with Fisher on the merits of Nicholas Smith's conducting. What was puzzling, though, and maybe revealing about Fisher's column came in this rather interesting passage: "[Smith] looks, sounds, and carries himself like a symphony conductor from central casting. Does that matter? You bet."  Fisher goes out of his way to make that point that "I [Fisher] do know a bit about marketing, something those who pushed for Smith's ouster seem not to recognize the importance of."  Dangling prepositions notwithstanding, Fisher certainly is entitled to defend Smith on musical grounds but is way off base in not realizing this decision was (I believe) driven by marketing considerations.

When he writes about a "conductor from central casting," I think Fisher must be getting his idea of what a conductor is from old movies. And what can he mean by "sounds...like a conductor"? Fisher may be a marketing guy, but I think he's way out-of-date with the image he's carrying around in his mind when he thinks "symphony conductor." How did these folks ever get through Mr. Fisher's "casting call?"

Robert Spano, the Atlanta Symphony's conductor.

Kent Nagano, Montreal Symphony.

Probably the most talked-about conductor in America, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who transformed the LA music scene and who is about to hand the orchestra off to...

the 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, the next Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

This is William Eddins, Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony and one of the candidates for the Charlotte Symphony Music Director post.

 Jo-Ann Falletta, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony.

Marin Alsop, Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony.

 David Robertson, Music Director of St. Louis Symphony.

Getting the picture? There no longer is just one image of "the conductor." The old cartoon with Bugs Bunny as "Leopold" couldn't be made today. It just wouldn't make any sense. The "central casting" image of the conductor as necessarily male, European, and tuxedoed has been out of date for quite some time, but Fisher seems not to know this. As I said above, where I think Fisher is mistaken is in thinking that the SC Phil Board is not taking marketing into account in their search for a new Music Director. On the contrary, I think you could make a case that they threw Smith overboard not primarily from musical considerations, but because of marketing issues. Classical music organizations are obsessed with trying to appeal to younger generations, and to broaden other demographic aspects of their audience base. A quick glance at any classical music industry blog will confirm that, and every day seems to bring a news item detailing this or that orchestra's efforts in that regard (here is today's example, from San Antonio).

The list of candidates for the next SC Philharmonic Music Director reflects that desire on the part of the Board; the emphasis is on youth, with candidates in their 30's and 40's, both men and women. I think if anything, many American orchestras are trying to escape the very "central casting" traditional idea of a conductor still held by many like Kevin Fisher...they're looking for youth, ethnic and gender diversity. Smith may be, if anything, a victim of this trend (being a conductor from central casting may have mattered after all in this case, but not in the way Fisher imagines). The SC Phil is probably hoping for a flashier, media-savvy "draw" around which to build a broader audience base. Is this fair to Nicholas Smith? No, if that's the only genesis of this whole transition.  Will it work? Not unless the new Music Director also has the goods musically speaking.

Fortunately there are many young gifted conductors out there who also have an up-to-date understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities for a small city's orchestra like this one. With all due respect for all that Nicholas Smith has accomplished since 1993 in this city, I'm optimistic that one of the seven guest conductors next season will be the right person to lead the South Carolina Philharmonic into the next era.

The Columbia Festival of the Arts is history, and the post-event evaluations are decidedly mixed. I wish I could have been around for the second week of events (yeah, it was a heavy burden having to go to Maui), and can really only refer you to three other views on how it went. The first is Marvin Chernoff's own view,, reposted on Brad Warthen's blog over at the State; the second is State arts reporter Jeffrey Day's overview, and the third is Dan Cook's take over at the Free Times.

One thing that does seem to have been successful were the visual arts components, especially the open houses of artists studios over last weekend. Though Chernoff reportedly will not himself undertake a second go-round of the Festival, it's certain that some version of the studio tours will be repeated sometime.

Last night at the Maui Classical Music Festival, Joseph Lin and I played the second of Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano, the A Major, Op. 12, No. 2. It was a lovely breezy evening a few miles upslope from the north coast of Maui, in a church near the village of Makalao. The audience seemed happily wrapped up in the generally jovial atmosphere of that early Beethoven work, and I got to thinking about the migration across time and space and the peoples of our planet that this music has made.

Here we were, a person of Taiwanese descent but American-raised, and an 7th-generation American, playing Beethoven's music on an island halfway around the planet from where it was written, a land Beethoven might barely have heard of , if at all (Captain Cook having visited it for the first time less than twenty years earlier), for an audience made up largely of well-to-do retirees from a country which had only won its independence fourteen years before this Sonata was written, who were in this place at this moment in large part because of that nation's economic-military-political strong-arm tactics in basically annexing these islands and adding them to its empire in the century following this Sonata's composition. The music exists in part because of history, as much as many classical performers would like to deny that fact, but it is also unquestionably true that this music exists in a dimension beyond history. Coming to terms with both sides of that coin will go a long way to helping us bring this music to people in all forseeable futures and in all imaginable places.

Thinking about these matters, my sense of historical curiosity naturally led me to wonder what we would have witnessed were we standing on the same spot as we were last night, only in 1797 at the time this piece was written. One thing I learned is that only a few miles to the west, in the Iao Valley, one of the most momentous battles of Hawaiian history took place only a few years earlier, in 1790. This was the Battle of Kepaniwai, where the legions of the great Hawaiian warrior-king Kamehameha defeated those of the rulers of Maui, going a long way towards cementing the eventual unification under Kamehameha of all the Hawaiian islands.

Tomorrow with Lin, Che-Yen Chen, and Jacob Braun (all members of the brilliant---and young!---Formosa Quartet, 1st prize winners at the 2006 London String Quartet Competition) I'll be playing Gabriel Faure's 1st Piano Quartet in C Minor. The concert is at another one of the lovely Maui churches, this time at Makena in what's considered South Maui. The location of this church is spectacular, just yards from the ocean:

...and I have to add, the piano that lives at this church is in remarkable condition only because of the extremely good care it receives to ward off the effects of the sea air (felt cover inside the piano as well to protect the strings against corrosion).

Time and place for Faure's Quartet? 1879, in France, during the turbulent but artistically fruitful early days of the Third Republic, just a few years after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. And in Hawaii at that time? Things had changed a lot from the days of Kamehameha. It's interesting to note that this church was here already, in fact was already nearly half a century old.

A hugely pivotal event in the history of Hawaiian-American relations had occurred three years earlier: the Reciprocity Treaty of 1876, which allowed sugar to be imported duty-free into the United States. The sugar industry really took off at that point in Hawaii, transforming both the landscape of the islands as well as the population; the native Hawaiian population, decimated by disease, was insufficient in numbers to work the plantations, hence the subsequent huge importation of workers especially from China and Japan. America received access to Pearl Harbor by means of that treaty, and became the dominant economic factor in Hawaiian life from that moment on. It only took 17 years for this dominant economic role to expand to the political, culminating on January 14, 1893, when "the United States Minister assigned to the sovereign and independent Kingdom of Hawaii conspired with a small group of non-Hawaiian residents of the Kingdom of Hawaii, including citizens of the United States, to overthrow the indigenous and lawful Government of Hawaii." (Text from the Apology Resolution passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton on November 23, 1993)[photo: Keawala'i Congregational Church]

Reading Anthony DePalma's report in last Tuesday's New York Times on the recent progress General Electric has made in cleaning the Housatonic River should have cheered me, but somehow I was sad, never having realized in the first place how G.E. had dumped PCB's into that river for some 40 years. Poisoning any river is criminal, but this river will always hold extra significance to anyone who loves the music of Charles Ives, being the subject of perhaps the most haunting art song in American music, "The Housatonic at Stockbridge":

But remarkable advances have been made in the technology for ridding rivers of toxic substances. Perhaps the Housatonic will soon return to a health it has not enjoyed since that afternoon in June, 1908, when Charlie and his new wife (in his words) "walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river..."

Ives set sixteen lines selected from a much longer poem by Robert Underwood Johnson. As they are sung in this setting, Johnson's "Housatonic at Stockbridge": 

Contented river in thy dreamy realm
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm:
Thou beautiful! from ev'ry dreamy hill
What eye but wanders with thee at thy will.

Contented river! And yet overshy
To mask thy beauty from the eager eye;
Hast thou a thought to hide from field and town?
In some deep current of the sunlit brown.

Ah! there's a restive ripple,
And the swift red leaves
September's firstlings faster drift;
Wouldst thou away, dear stream?

Come, whisper near!
I also of much resting have a fear;
Let me tomorrow thy companion be,
By fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!