Sorry if this image scared you… Scroll (or read) to the very bottom to find out what it is 🙂
Stravinsky experimented with modern forms of music through Rite of Spring which caused a riot… Although there are no riots today and the audiences are generally more civilized, might we still hear some hot takes on atonal and modern music?
Welcome back to part II of our interview with Judy Gershon! We hope you enjoy the article 🙂
FD: A lot of your compositions that I listened to are really accessible and down to earth and I really appreciate that. A lot of the avant-garde stuff is what scares people away from engaging with classical music or even just music in general. They think it’s something difficult, but it actually isn’t.
G: Thanks, I appreciate it!! I’m glad you feel that way.
I always liked listening to to popular music when I was your age, much more than I listened to classical music. When I was studying music at U of T, in some of these advanced theory courses – or even advanced music history – there was some 20th century music and we’d all have to play a certain amount on our piano exams. I felt like it was more of an intellectual exercise than an exercise in beauty and engagement. Sure, it’s really cool to find the 12 tone scale in the Schoenberg piece when you get the score in front of you… It’s fascinating to analyze, and I do love analysis. I love taking the score and finding the things, but you could never hear it. You would never be able to identify when you’re listening.
Isn’t music an auditory experience? Isn’t it supposed to make sense as we listened to it, somehow? I think we got to a point where we wanted to just keep pushing the boundaries in an intellectual way… but at some point, it’s got to have a melody or something that we can latch onto. Being completely unique isn’t as important as still being able to connect.
FD: I guess to each their own.
Personally, I am not too much of a fan of atonal music. I prefer to listen to something with a melody or something that evokes a certain emotion to me. Atonal music just doesn’t do that for me. That aside, there is a certain kind of trend to, as you said, push the boundaries of music to really expand its definition. But when you’re too far into that, you forget music’s purpose.
G: I guess we only really can understand where the boundaries are and by pushing them and pushing them and pushing them and sort of figuring out when it’s too far.
When you use the word atonal I was thinking about Debussy – sounded atonal to the people or the music sensibility of the time. But our musical palettes now are bigger in a way, because we have the advantage of being exposed to Bach, Mozart, Liszt, Debussy and Stravinsky… I remember my older sister, who’s an awesome musician, would say “maybe those atonal music won’t sound completely inaccessible 100 years from now.” I don’t think it’s true. It’s been 100 years and it still sounds pretty… rough.
Atonality is all about losing the tonal center. The tonal center grounds us. It helps us know where we’re driving to in a piece of music. Where is it going? How far has it gone and have we arrived there? Oh. I think we’re almost there – and we’ve arrived. We need a tonal center to give us direction.
FD: Debussy has a key.
G: Yeah, Debussy’s not atonal, absolutely not. And I love Debussy. Obviously, we have a certain idea of “no, this doesn’t really sound good, and I don’t care for this music because that doesn’t sound like music to me.” Maybe other people at earlier times in history might have said, “that doesn’t sound like music to me because those chords are really weird – it sounds so dissonant adding all those flat 7ths…”
Some of the harmonies in Debussy and in even Gershwin – add all those sort of bluesy, jazzy harmonies – they were new and might have sounded very kind of harsh to the ear at that time. But, there is a difference between that and atonality for sure.
FD: What do you think about sound painting? Debussy does sound painting, but some contemporary sound paintings also completely lose tonal sense and strive to create a sentiment or create a feeling with their music. Though sometimes it’s without a melody or a key, it still evokes an image in your head. What do you think about that kind of genre?
G: I admire them.
The first thing that comes to my mind is incidental music for film or television. I was actually thinking about that last night because I was watching something – a show called Carol & the End of the World. It’s on Netflix – very interesting. It’s like an adult animated show, kind of funny and it’s kind of strange.
Anyway, I’ve done a fair amount of incidental music. I used to do it for all of the TV shows David and I did. The challenge for me in that kind of music is you have to get away from the melody – too much melody interferes with what you’re watching on the screen.
I was listening to the music [of the show] – it was very interesting, how it was more for effects. There was a little bit of a melodic line, and that melodic line only came when there was no dialogue on the screen; so, there’s definitely something to that – a piece of music as a soundscape.
I admire people who could do it – it can be very effective. Is it that when something doesn’t have melody, it’s not music? I still think it’s music. It’s a different kind of composition skill when you have to stay away from the melody. That’s what lets you free-float in space with pictures coming into your mind because there’s no melody to carry you through.
FD: A melody would distract you from whatever is happening.
G: It sucks you in. It’s seductive. You get to know it, and then you wonder where it’s going, and you wonder when it comes back and you. But if you don’t have a melody, it’s almost monotonous because it goes over and over again, and your mind is wandering somewhere else. It’s amazing.
FD: TI do want to talk about how you do a lot of virtual things with choir. I saw what you did with the ensembles online. And then I watched one of the sample videos or tutorial videos of you conducting. So, did that idea emerge from Covid?
G: Boy, did you ever do your homework and your research?
A lot of that was David. My husband had some video editing background; he never studied it, but he’s just very smart and intuitive with technology. When we were doing television and live shows he was very involved in that production side of it as well.
When Covid happened I had two choirs that I was leading. One of my choirs was supposed to do a big concert – a Holocaust memorial concert in Ottawa and the Toronto Jewish Chorus was asked to sing in it. It was going to be on April 22nd, 2020. They asked us in the fall of 2019. Little did we know…
I read and reread the Diary of Anne Franks and wrote a piece to her words. The choir was learning it, and we loved it. And then, COVID happened, the event got canceled. But, someone in the choir said, “Hey, maybe we could make one of those choir videos.” That’s what we did, and that was our first video.
You know what it’s like when you sing in a choir and how it becomes like your family? A lot of the people in my choir are older. Most of them are retired, and for a lot of them choir is the highlight of their week. They love the people that they sing with, and they love the music. Of course, what I think is amazing about choir is that you can create something together that’s better than any of us could do individually. We make something more beautiful together than any of us could do on our own. When we realized that we all have to isolate, and that one of the most dangerous things to do is to sing together, it was devastating to a choir.
So I said, “Well, we’re going to have choir practice online.” That wasn’t really very easy because of the syncing problems, but I persevered. Then, someone else showed me a guide video that some other choirs had done where they had the score on the video and showed that to David… And he came up with this. We fine-tuned the guide videos – then it was quite a thing to get all these 50, 60 and 70 year olds to figure out how to set themselves up so that they could watch my guide video and record themselves at the same time. The learning curve was big.
When you’re making those virtual choir videos, you listen to the guide video in your headphones, then you’re recording just your voice singing along to the guide. So just imagine how that would sound. Terrible! Even if you’re a really good singer, it’s still so dry and raw… You’re singing this song, there’s no one else, and not one of these people are soloists. So, they have to endure this horrible sounding video and force themselves to just send it to me anyway.
Eventually, we figured out how to record how to rehearse on Zoom, and came up with little tricks to try to make it meaningful and effective. I’d send them all a guide track, then we would put them all together on the video screen, and we’d take all the audio and put it into a different music program… It was a real exercise and delayed gratification because it’d take a few months.
FD: Is it in some sense more satisfying than rehearsing offline because there’s so much delay?
G: Also, the end product is just so different from the process…
No one is begging me to make any more of them since we’ve been back live – but it was a really great plan B. What I was experiencing with my choir and my synagogue choir was what so many other synagogue choirs were experiencing all over all over the world. David and I sort of put the word out that we could help them with this. His regular business was producing live children’s shows in schools and theaters, but he could do none of that, and this was a great way that he was able to have an income. We did so many of these videos for many choirs over COVID. It was fun, but it was a lot.
Then, once COVID ended, it just ended. Hardly anybody wants to do them anymore. You know, you can make them sound better by tuning them, but, like to your point, it’s not all about how good you are.
FD: When you’re recording these videos do you just conduct to a wall or conduct to the camera?
G: I just stare at my camera and I use Photo Booth…. sometimes I would just literally take my phone and put it on a stand, and put my music on a stand just below the frame so that you couldn’t see the music. I would make my conducting video after David put all the music on the guide video, so that I could just press play on the guided video, watch the music as it’s going by and conduct looking at it that way. I’m just pretending to conduct nobody… but it keeps everybody in sync, and also keeps them in sync with their intention. I try to keep their energy up at certain times to keep it smooth.
FD: I do think choir conductors are really awesome. Sometimes it’s not about the rhythm or something — it’s about making the choir breathe together. And I think that’s fascinating.
I went to Messiah at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the conductor felt like a choir conductor to me. She conducted the whole orchestra, but a lot of her gestures to the choir just made me feel like she might be a choir conductor instead of conducting the orchestra full- time.
G: I haven’t conducted a big symphony orchestra. It must be pretty scary to stop giving the beat.
But, I love conducting. It is wonderful because it’s almost like a dance. The music comes through you and you’re trying to show people what the music means to you and how you hear it, so that they will feel it the same way and they will sing it the same way. I love that part of it. I used to be very intimidated by the idea of conducting – I wasn’t really quite sure what to do with my hands. But then once you get a little more confident and realize, oh, I do things and get people to respond to the music the way I’m responding to their music.
Sometimes, you listen to a piece of music, and you hear it a certain way. Then you just think, well, everybody’s hearing that, everybody must be hearing it a particular way. But then you find out, actually, it’s when you tell somebody that this is how you’re hearing it. That’s kind of what conducting is – you get to dictate how everyone’s feeling it.
Thanks for reading our interview! Hope this article got you to reflect on the purpose of music and what constitutes of it. We will see you in the next interview!
Cover image: Arnold Schonberg’s Red Gaze.
frederick debussy 
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