When a Writer Must Speak Instead of Write

In order to work, writers need solitude, and they need to be comfortable with it.  My guess is that most writers tend to be introverts who are more comfortable alone than in large groups.  Introverts are also uncomfortable with public speaking.  Ironically, actors can be either introverted or extroverted.  Their personal characteristics do not necessarily affect their professional work.  I am a total introvert.

In high school, to prepare myself for the wider world, I took a speech class my senior year.  My English teachers also recruited me to compete in a storytelling contest in which I progressed to the state finals.  During my adult work life, I’ve had jobs in which I needed to speak well, whether in meetings or at sales conferences.  I was not required, however, to give speeches or presentations on my work.  That is a totally new experience for me.

My presentation last Saturday at the Minnesota Mensa Regional Gathering on material from the memoir I’m working on, The Successful Patient, went far better than I anticipated.  I presented to a full room of attentive and engaged people.  Their attentiveness reassured me.  The slides were in the correct order and worked on the laptop.  The Q&A discussion brought good questions, additional suggestions for patients to be successful in taking care of themselves, and excellent comments.  The feedback continued for the rest of the day and even into this past week — all positive.  You’d think I’d be ecstatic, right?  But….

My first issue, of course, was my jangled nerves.  I could do with a lot less of them.  I’ve been thinking all week about how to stop the nerves and came to the realization that for me, the nervousness is about my lack of self-confidence.  Once I’ve done more successful public speaking, my self-confidence will increase and the nerves, I hope, will decrease.  Then I won’t knock over my glass of water as I did last Saturday, and won’t need to take Imodium twice before the presentation.  I’ve been thinking about what I did right, and what I could do better in the future:

• Practice, practice, practice.  I rehearsed my presentation over and over, adding, subtracting, doing it a little different each time.  I knew what I wanted to say in the introduction, for each slide, and for my conclusion.  I had practiced it so much that my nervousness could not make me blank out.
• Remember your intent/purpose.  I wanted to share information and experiences that I believed could be helpful to others.  This was really important to me and motivated my presentation.
• The audience wants to hear what I have to say — or they would not have taken the time to attend the presentation.  It helped to have friends in the audience, and a champion who smiled every time I looked at her, but it also helped to look at each person’s face, to see their concentration, their interest.  It’s hard to look at the audience, but it is an essential way to include them.  I’m glad I did it.
• Have alone time before the presentation.  I didn’t know I needed this until I was there and had no time to quiet my mind, ground myself, and focus.  Everyone I know who performs always takes time alone before starting the performance.  I need to keep that in mind for the future.
• There’s usually at least one person who wants to take you off topic.  Last Saturday, she sat right in the front row, and she wanted to talk about medical insurance which I had not included in my presentation.  I listened to her, then explained to the room that I wouldn’t be talking about medical insurance — a huge topic that deserved it’s own presentation.  She came back at me a little later, and I repeated what I’d said earlier.  When I talked about patients needing to be curious and to ask questions, I motioned to that woman in the front row, to let her know that it was a good thing to ask questions, even if I was not going off topic to answer them.

What pleased me the most after it was all over?  I saw people take their answer sheets with them.  They’d written notes they wanted to keep.  I’d given them information they could use.  I had fulfilled my purpose for doing that presentation……

More Next Week…..

I leave early this afternoon to attend a conference at which I’ll be giving a presentation.  My nerves are a mess.  Public speaking is not my favorite thing to do although I’ve done my share of it in the past.  The presentation is an important one, however, based on material I’ll be using in my memoir about being a successful patient.

As a result of this commitment, I won’t be posting here tomorrow as I usually do.  Perhaps I will collect ideas at the conference for future posts here…we’ll see.  I just need to get control of my nerves!

More next week…..

The Minnesota Orchestra: A Conductor’s Musical Instrument Torn Apart?

Burt Hara with MO (credit: Nate Ryan LLC)

Emotions have been swirling high around the Minnesota Orchestra (MO) this past week.  First came the news that their Principal Clarinetist (much beloved) Burt Hara had won an audition for Associate Principal Clarinet with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Hara has been a staunch long-time member of the MO and an active member of the Twin Cities music community as a teacher and performer.  His departure is a wounding blow, but I don’t believe anyone blames Hara.  He commented that if there were no lockout, he wouldn’t even consider accepting the job offer.

Next came the news that Music Director Osmo Vänskä had written another letter, only his second during the lockout, to Jon Campbell and Michael Henson, his boss and Chairman of the Board, and the President and CEO of the MOA, respectively.  As Music Director and in that role, Chief Artistic Manager, Mr. Vänskä made it clear what the priorities need to be in order to maintain the artistic excellence of the MO, honor their invitation to Carnegie Hall in November and honor their recording commitments, especially in light of musicians’ departures.  He wrote that the Concertmaster had two offers from other orchestras but didn’t want to leave.  Mr. Vänskä underscored the direness of the situation by saying he would be forced to resign if Carnegie Hall canceled the MO’s concert because they had lost confidence in the MO’s ability to perform at a high level of artistic excellence.  The lockout needs to end and MOA management led by

Disappearing MN Orchestra Musicians

Campbell and Henson have the power to end it, not the musicians.

I have to say, in my opinion, the MOA management has worked hard to blame everyone but themselves for the truly devastating situation they’ve created.  It’s the musicians’ fault for being union, having a contract that protects their working conditions and pay, and for Pete’s sake, not offering a counter-proposal to the MOA’s “final” proposal offered last year when one is not necessary for negotiations.  (That last is a “stalling tactic” if ever I’ve seen one.)  They blame the Twin Cities community for not supporting the MOA financially with enough donations that could sustain the orchestra and organization at the world-class level the community wants.  They blame rotten advice from an investment advisor (no longer advising them) back in 2007-08.  But they do not take responsibility for their fiduciary duty to the orchestra and organization, and the mistakes and miscalculations and misdirection in the past 5-6 years that has led them to the present moment in which the orchestra has begun to disintegrate and the Music Director is threatening to resign.   They blame others so that they can say it’s up to others to bring the parties back to negotiations so they do not have to own their responsibility in stalling, deflecting, going back on agreements, treating the musicians with disrespect, and in being untrustworthy.

As a writer, not a conductor/musician, I cannot know what Osmo Vänskä has been going through since the lockout began on October 1, 2012.  From my extensive research for the Perceval series into conductors, their education, training, jobs, and lives, I can say that it must be excruciatingly painful to watch MOA management destroy his musical instrument and everything he’s accomplished since he stepped onto the Orchestra Hall podium as Music Director in 2003.  I was a pianist years ago, and the analogy for me is if someone started to dismantle my piano, one key at a time, preventing me from playing my instrument.  I fear that it may become too much to bear and Osmo will resign anyway.  He will do just fine on his own – as a conductor, he’s in demand all over the world.  But not us, not Minnesota, not the classical music world and not the MO.  MOA management just doesn’t get it, and they don’t understand that they don’t get it.

In an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune this past week, Board Chairman Jon Campbell said that in 2009, when Osmo signed his contract extension, they gave him a “heads-up that the business model was changing – in short, contract talks would be tough.”  What business model?  I feel like I’ve missed something because I don’t recall the MOA spelling out in detail what their new business model would be.  I hope they don’t mean the Strategic Plan 2012-15?  I thought that was under review and analysis by an independent financial analyst?  Plus, this comment also confirms that MOA management had planned how they would crow about the MOA’s financial stability and balanced budgets, even though neither was really true, until they approached contract talks, and then the financial situation would become dire to force the musicians to accept a completely gutted master agreement.

Has Mr. Henson and Mr. Ebensteiner accepted 50% cuts to their salaries?  No.  Instead, they have laid off staff until there are really not enough staff to support effectively the organization.  Instead, they have orchestrated a contract offer that cuts musician salaries by 30-50 percent, and deleted all the gains in establishing secure, safe, and positive working conditions since 1983.  Instead, they proceeded with the $50 million Orchestra Hall lobby and auditorium renovation which still needs more money.  Instead, they slashed  the orchestra’s season, shortening it and the summer season to such an extent that revenue decreased.  Instead, they have inserted into the musician master agreement sections that would transfer artistic decisions from the Music Director to MOA management.  And the Board of Directors does nothing?  They agree with all this?  Do they despise classical music so much?

If they weren’t so entrenched and rigid in their approach to negotiations, MOA management and the Board would probably agree that there are always several ways to resolve a conflict.  First stop blaming others for your mistakes.  Both sides need to be flexible.  No “final” proposals, in other words.  No need for counter-proposals.  End the lockout and enter a “play and talk” period.  That would go a long way toward giving the musicians reason to return to negotiations.  But don’t be surprised if they don’t trust you completely.  MOA management has the power and the control at this point to act.  What happens in the next few weeks will reveal their true intentions regarding the Minnesota Orchestra and its future.

Why I Love Classical Music: a Minnesota Orchestra Concert

Bruckner circa 1860 (from Wikipedia)

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, famous for his massive “wall of sound” symphonies, began his professional life as a teacher.  He continued to study to improve his position, and eventually became organist in St. Florian, Austria.  He had loved the organ since childhood, and the organ’s sound would influence his music.  Known for being a devout Catholic, for his love of beer and his belief in his inferiority, Bruckner was also always tinkering with his symphonies, and did not always leave clear indications of which version of each he preferred.

I’d heard Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and his Ninth in the years after I graduated college.  His music sounded muddled to me, bombastic, clearly influenced by Richard Wagner (it was), and intensely unpleasant to my ears.  I hated it.  Then someone told me — I cannot remember who now — that the devout Bruckner had dedicated each of his symphonies “An Gott” or “To God.”  I thought that was somehow grandiose of Bruckner and only added to my distaste for his music.

Then in November 1989 Klaus Tennstedt, former Principal Guest Conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra, returned to conduct the Minnesota Orchestra for two weeks — the first week was Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, and the second, two Beethoven symphonies.  It would be the only time I saw Tennstedt conduct in concert.  He had an excellent relationship with the MO musicians.  I bought my ticket to the Beethoven concert immediately.  Friends had to persuade me to go to the Bruckner concert.  I was glad they did.  With this symphony, Anton Bruckner took me on a journey in sound through an astounding emotional landscape, recreated by Tennstedt and the MO with such precision and discipline, I thought maybe this was Heaven on earth.

Music alters human consciousness.  I’ve had peak experiences in symphonic concert halls so powerful that I have not remembered at all how I returned home afterward.  The Bruckner Eighth Symphony was a peak experience.  From that point on, I would slowly learn about Bruckner’s music, learn to appreciate it even if I didn’t understand it, and to open my heart to it.

This past Thursday evening in St. Catherine University’s O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul, the MO once again played Bruckner out of this world, this time the Fourth Symphony, “Romantic,” conducted by noted Bruckner expert Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.  This symphony has the title of “Romantic” because Bruckner gave it this title, seemingly in a desire to fit in with the times — 1874 — and the Romantic era in the arts (remember his inferiority complex).  His abundant use of the French horn also fits with the Romantic era in music.  This is a symphony of powerful sound, amazing crescendos, and for the string players, a real danger of developing a repetitive motion injury.  The sound, the symphony, were sublime.

I love classical music concerts — all kinds: recitals, chamber music, chorales, symphonic.  From a very young age, sound affected me emotionally and set free my imagination.  With Bruckner, I hear thunder and lightning, the booming of cannon, sweet folk melodies and rhythmic folk dances of Austria.  I hear a huge organ in a cathedral, inflating the air with sound, lyrical melodies, plaintive harmonies, the power of conviction and faith.  The sound enters the human body, vibrates the molecules, stimulates the brain, alters consciousness.  It is my drug of choice and always has been.

Each composer, in the way he or she uses the tools of composition and the language of music, creates a distinct voice and speaks to listeners.  Music communicates, for me, pure emotion.  Did Bruckner feel the same as I felt Thursday evening listening to his Fourth Symphony?  Each listener brings to a concert all her experience, her life, her emotional knowledge, so the experience can be unique for each with a thread of common experience — listening to sound specific to a composer’s musical voice.  The oldest musical instrument is the human voice, the vocal cords that produce the sounds of the voice whether singing or speaking.  Of course humans would be sensitive to sound and music teaches us how to listen with an open mind, open heart, and all of our intelligence.  That’s why I love classical music.  It has the power to transcend differences and to unite us.

But the MO’s concert this past Thursday evening saddened me, too.  The musicians remain locked out by the MOA Board of Directors, and recent communications from executive management has only driven the two sides farther apart, I believe.  They say they’ll do something, then they back out.  Or they invite the musicians to a Board meeting but allow them only fifteen minutes to speak.  I’m shocked, totally astonished, and completely flummoxed by the MOA Board’s behavior during the last year.  Does no one serving on the Board love classical music?  Or do they only love money?  Control?  I think of the Minnesota Orchestra I gave Evan Quinn to conduct in Perceval’s Secret and I fear that what I extrapolated into the near future is in the process of actually happening.  It chills me to the bone….