Program Note Satori

I practice a double career. On Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays from the end of August to mid-May I'm a college professor, the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It's a really good job and I'm really good at it. I've been in the saddle for 47 years, so I think it's safe to say that I am an experienced teacher and solid department chair.

But I also have a cottage industry, i.e., second career, which started about 25 years ago. In this incarnation, which goes on round the clock, I am a program annotator – the person who writes the notes that appear in program books at concerts or recitals. It's a form of writing that's closer to food or travel writing than music, given that its purpose is to entice and attract folks who are coming to hear the concert, to prepare them to hear a particular piece of music, or maybe help them process what they've just heard. It isn't journalism and it is most indubitably not academic research. Most musicologists make lousy program annotators, in fact. It takes somebody more like me – a musical gadfly with deep roots in professional music-making and a near-unquenchable thirst for the written word.

I consider it a noble calling, but it's also a good solid commercial endeavor. Unlike most academics, who may slave over an article that's read by maybe a half-dozen colleagues in some obscure but prestigious academic journal, I get read by buckets of people. Just consider the audiences at a large symphony orchestra; maybe 2000 or so per evening, for three subscription concerts per week. That's 6000 people who might read or at least scan through my note, not to mention online readers. I get more readers in one night than most academics get over the course of their entire careers. And I get paid more for it, as well. Nobody will ever get rich from writing program notes, but for stuff I can whip up in my home office/studio, it ain't bad at all.

But you have to be really good to make it work. Otherwise an organization might hire you for one note and then diplomatically refrain from ever asking you again. If you're bad enough they might pay for the note but refrain from publishing it. If you're beyond terrible, they may reject the note altogether and refuse to pay for it. (I knew a guy who was that bad. Assigned a program note for one piece on a children's concert, he went into lurid detail about the composer's kinky sex life.)

But if you're good, if you can write solid English prose in an engaging manner that keeps people reading along, if you can get your message across without talking down to readers or getting too much in the weeds about technical or historical matters, then you'll get noticed. Build it and they will come.

Which is what has happened to me with my cottage-industry writing career. It began with occasional notes for the San Francisco Symphony – a priceless connection got that started – and then moved on and on, up and up. I learned my craft as program annotator for a number of fine organizations, made my mistakes, but kept learning and growing as much as I could. Writing isn't something you can learn from a book, after all. You have to do it. Lots and lots of it.

So nowadays I'm one of the busiest classical music commentators around, as the regular program annotator for the California Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Maestro Foundation, and Grand Teton Music Festival, as well as being a frequent contributor to the program books of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the San Francisco Symphony, and a bevy of smaller organizations hither, thither, and yon. I write something to the tune of 100,000 words a year – about the length of your average novel. As Steve Jobs said, real artists ship. Well, real writers sell, and I sell every article I write.

All that writing requires researching and exploring. You can't write effectively about music you don't know, after all, so the first task for creating an effective program note is learning the music. If it's a short little thing you can probably knock it in a few hearings + going through the score. But bigger stuff requires more heroic measures.

Which brings me to the current topic. Among my assignments of late is the utterly ginormous and downright intimidating Symphony No. 7 in E Minor by Gustav Mahler. It's a piece I really didn't know all that well, but I was charged with writing 1500 words, and they must be good words. I would rather quit writing altogether than give this organization anything less than my best. And it will be my best, my experience, my voice.

So I gave myself plenty of advance time. I started listening to the symphony movement by movement, always with the score in hand, until I had it reasonably well imprinted. (Fortunately I imprint fairly quickly.) I researched and read extensively, not only from the big tomes like the La Grange monograph on Mahler but also by seeking out other program notes, books, articles new and old, even newspaper reviews. Very little of that will ever wind up in a program note but all of it helps to condition and temper the mix.

When the afternoon arrived that I deemed myself ready to attempt a draft, I went stone cold. It just wasn't coming, and after all these years of high-productivity writing I've learned never to force if it won't come. I've also learned not to panic. My muse – I like to call her Doris – will speak to me when she's ready. And clearly she wasn't ready.

I attended to other matters and went to bed at my usual time.

And woke up at 2:00 AM with the entire note all laid out and shaped in my head. Not every word, mind you. But the flow of the thing and, most importantly, the overall style and feel of it. Any larger note such as this one is going to have its own personality, its own character. I rolled it around in my head for an hour or so and then managed to get back to sleep.

The next morning I got to work immediately after breakfast and had a viable first draft in the can within a few hours. Two proofing sessions later it was done, at least for now. I'm an inveterate tinkerer and twiddler so I may pay it another visit before the submission deadline – which is still about a month away. I'm an early-bird type when it comes to deadlines.

So there it is: satori at 2:00 AM for a program note on the Mahler Seventh. Of course these things don't come out of the blue. I had been reading incessantly and listening even more intently. It was just a matter of time before my subconscious (a.k.a. Doris my dear muse from Delphi) gave me the note.

So, yes, it's a creative act. And it's something of a rare specialty art. Not that many people can do it well. I'm quite certain that I'm not flattering myself when I group myself in with the can-do program annotators. After all, some of the finest organizations in the business value my stuff and are only too happy to pay for it. But more to the point, I myself like it and take justified pride in the high quality of the writing, research, and musicianship that goes into my notes.

And I'm positive that this particular note on the Mahler Seventh is a real corker of a note, just jim-dandy, peachy-keen, and crazy good.