Getting at the Emotional Content

I count among my former teachers Eli Epstein, with whom I studied the year after I finished my Masters degree. He was a featured guest at our horn day at ASU in 2005, as recounted in this post. As a part of his visit to ASU he performed the Brahms Trio in his innovative “Inside Out” format.

I was recently pointed to a post in Entrepreneur The Arts where Eli describes Inside Out. The whole article is worth looking over as a part of thinking over what it means to present any solo performance or concert effectively, but there are two sections I would like to highlight. As a background to these concerts he notes,

I’ve been passionate about classical music my whole life. As a child, I performed as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra several times; as an adult I was a member of the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra for 18 years. In those formal settings, the artificial wall that separated musicians and audiences troubled me.

I began thinking about how I might improve the connection with an audience by creating a more informal atmosphere and presenting novel ways to help people relate better to the music. When I started conducting ensembles at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2000, I noticed how much the students craved to be emotionally connected to what they were doing. I was rehearsing Brahms’s Serenade No. 2, and came to a difficult cello passage. Instead of saying, “Cellos, you really need to practice that,” I took a different tact. I said, “When I think about this melancholy passage, it reminds me of the gypsies in Vienna, who were probably looked down upon and didn’t have enough to eat.” An oboe player raised his hand and half-jokingly said, “That’s how I feel as a music student, looked down upon and hungry!” Everyone laughed. I said, “Okay, so you’ve felt how those gypsies might have felt. Hold onto that.” We played the passage again and the sound of the cello section changed completely. It was dark and emotional, and most of the technical problems had disappeared. The students and I were amazed. I started thinking about how I could give listening audiences a similar “right brain” experience.

There are certainly times in teaching and playing where you need to step back and just focus on the result desired and the emotion behind the result. Images convey ways of playing that go far beyond the somewhat etude-like approach encountered often in student performances in particular.

Later in the article he speaks more of his concert format and specifically of the Brahms trio, a big favorite of horn players.

Through my collaboration with three different psychotherapists, Ceci MacDonnell LISW, Alan Bachers PhD, and Cynthia Anne Hale PhD, Inside Out has evolved to include guided visualizations to connect concertgoers with universal emotional themes such as joy, loss, strength, struggle, gratitude and grace.

For example, I presented Brahms’s Horn Trio, which, I told the audience, was written during the year after his mother died. I related that loss is a universal human experience, and led a guided meditation to help the audience get in touch with their sorrows. After the concert, the pianist of the trio said, “Eli, do you realize that half the people in the audience were crying during the third movement?”

In all performances we want to move the audience in some manner to be sure. Eli currently is living in the Boston area; check his website for more information on his horn and Inside Out activities.