I will interrupt this topical blog to talk about performing a piece that one should not perform in a Christian worship setting.
Benjamin Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, op. 49 is probably one of the more recognized and performed pieces of the solo oboe repertoire. The music is programmatic; it paints a musical picture of a story. The pieces are challenging, but accessible by high school students, and have been recorded by many famous oboists since its conception in 1951.
Over the last calendar year, I've gone through an intense period of self-reflection. It has included extreme sadness, anger, happiness, research, denial, doubt, and regret. One of these reflections has been the realization that many people do not want to attend a traditional classical music recital "just because," especially in a rural area. The new questions have become, "How can I create an event that is unique that piques people's curiosity?" and "Where is there already an audience?"
I know that it is a bit cliche to run to the children's concert. Leonard Bernstein started running his Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic in 1958. His programs deconstruct the music and artfully educate about great composers like Mahler, Copland, and Corigliano. As an adult you can learn much from these videos! Since then, nonprofits have popped up in large cities around the world promoting classical music programs for kids. I recall performing Aires Tropicales by Paquito D'Rivera in Montreal with a woodwind quintet for the nonprofit, Bach before Bedtime. The woman MCing the event put noisemakers in the hands of over 200 small children and expected them to hold still until she told the kids it was time to make music. It was comical.
Flash forward to today. I wanted to perform Britten's Metamorphoses in an educational setting, but there aren't good books for small children on the six characters he portrays: Pan, Phaeton, Niobe, Bacchus, Narcissus, and Arethusa. As a solution, I became a children's storyteller. I created a PowerPoint with clip art as my illustrations. I dove into the original (translated--I am no scholar of ancient Greek) Ovid and found that all of the characters have brutally tragic endings. Niobe! Ovid went into great detail to describe each individual murder of all of Niobe's 14 children. To abridge Ovid, I simply translated the murders as, "Leto had her children take Niobe's children away." That is the PG version.
Rice Lake Public Library graciously hosted my Facebook live takeover. I designed the program to be around 25 minutes (the Britten takes 13 minutes to perform in a traditional recital setting). I told the story of each character with the clip art before each song. I gave specific directions for drawing or playing the child's own musical instruments during a song. A big benefit to doing something like a social media takeover is that you do not see your audience. This allowed me to ask kids to play along with the music. However, it made "interacting" with my audience strange and artificial. I also know that my live show reached a large number of people, but I am not sure what percentage of the audience was children and which percentage was the supportive members of my church!
For those of you wondering why this great piece of music shouldn't be performed in a Christian worship setting, I will cite the first commandment "You shall have no other gods before me." Exodus 20:3. Greek mythology is fun, but it does include of pantheon of gods that people did believe in and worship. The apostle Paul wrote to numerous Christian churches about what you do not bring from other religions into Christianity. Some musicians fall into the trap of "if it's classical music, it is appropriate for worship." Wrong! Some music is very generic and could fit under the right circumstances. This work is not generic. I do not believe that it worships the ancient deities of the Greeks however, it does tell stories that one should not tell when worshiping the one true God.
This work was very fun to develop into an educational program in a secular setting!
