Essay · · 2 min read
Orchestral Programming as Cultural Reclamation
Why the works we choose to perform matter as much as how we perform them — and what it means to put Latin American composers on the same stage as the European canon.
Field Note · · 2 min read
Rehearsal as Conversation
A quick note on what changes when you stop thinking of rehearsal as instruction and start thinking of it as dialogue.
Something shifted in my rehearsal approach this season that I want to document while it’s still fresh.
I’ve been experimenting with framing less and listening more. Instead of opening a rehearsal passage with “I need more legato in the second violins,” I’ve been asking: “What do you hear in this passage? What’s the character?”
The difference is not subtle.
What Changes
When musicians articulate their own interpretation before receiving direction, two things happen:
They invest. The interpretation becomes partly theirs, which changes how they execute it. There’s a difference between playing someone else’s idea of legato and playing your own.
I learn. Sometimes the section hears something I missed. A cellist last week described a passage as “restless” — a characterization I hadn’t considered but that immediately improved my understanding of the phrasing.
The Limits
This doesn’t work for everything. Intonation is not a conversation. Rhythmic precision is not a dialogue. Some things are just wrong and need to be fixed directly.
But for interpretive decisions — character, color, phrasing, energy — the conversational approach consistently produces better results than top-down instruction.
The Time Question
The obvious objection: “We don’t have time for discussion in rehearsal.” Fair. But I’ve found that two minutes of dialogue often saves ten minutes of repeated corrections. When musicians understand the why, they self-correct across similar passages without being told.
Still working on the balance. More to come as the season progresses.
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