{"id":724,"date":"2010-09-21T14:55:58","date_gmt":"2010-09-21T18:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=724"},"modified":"2011-10-14T14:25:56","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T18:25:56","slug":"a-day-in-the-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=724","title":{"rendered":"A Day in the Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Alan Gilbert<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u00a0am not going to introduce this blog with a portentous statement about what it means to be a music director today. This isn&#8217;t going to be a philosophical platform. Rather, I think that people might be interested in going behind the scenes, to know what I imagine many would find to be an unexpected range of items that cross my desk as music director. The job requires what I think is an unusual attention to a range of issues. It&#8217;s not just a question of having the skill to deal with the issues &#8211; you have to see which areas actually <em>are<\/em> &#8220;areas,&#8221; because you can&#8217;t deal with something until you understand that it has to be dealt with. I am looking forward to sharing random, perhaps even haphazard, musings on the great variety of topics that I have the pleasure and, it turns out, the surprise of addressing in the regular course of my work as the New York Philharmonic&#8217;s 25th music director.<\/p>\n<p>To kick things off I thought I might simply list what I accomplished &#8211; or tried to accomplish &#8211; in one specific day. Here is a partial summary of my agenda on Friday, September 17, the last day of the last week before the opening of my second season with this orchestra:<\/p>\n<p>After dropping my son off at pre-Kindergarten, I &#8230;<\/p>\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n<li>\u2022 spoke with Larry Tarlow, the Principal Librarian, asking him when I could expect the final installment of Wynton Marsalis&#8217;s revision of his piece that we are performing on Opening Night (September 22),<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 studied Dutilleux&#8217;s <em>M\u00e9taboles<\/em> (which I am conducting on the first subscription program of the season) for about 45 minutes, and<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 had a conversation with Eric Latzky, our V.P. of Communications, in preparation for a wrap-up of the Ligeti <em>Grand Macabre<\/em> project we performed last May, for a video taping later in the day for the League-formerly-known-as-ASOL.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 Then I went and did the taping, which was an hour and a half in which I and others discussed <em>Grand Macabre<\/em> for what the League is using as an educational tool to help orchestras understand why we did such a project, how we approached it, what made it such a success, what we learned about doing this kind of project in general, and what we learned about how we function as an institution approaching such a new area.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 Afterward I had a business lunch that involved discussions about our tour to Europe in October.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 When I came back, I found the revised score for Wynton&#8217;s piece on my desk, and checked with the library to see how different it was from the last version I&#8217;d received.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 I flipped through the score as I scrambled to prepare for a meeting I was going to have with Wynton later in the day.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 I spent time with David Snead, our V.P. of Marketing, talking about how we are going to promote <em>Kraft,<\/em> an ambitious work by Magnus Lindberg that we will be performing in early October.<\/li>\n<li>\u2022 Then I sat down with Monica Parks, our Director of Publications, to talk over ideas for this blog.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll stop this recitation here, even before my meeting with Wynton, and only say that when I was in high school and first imagined what the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic would do, it never in my wildest dreams occurred to me that it wasn&#8217;t just studying the music and showing up for rehearsals and concerts. I would love to be able to spend three hours, if not more, immersed in studying a score, and it is very rare that I can do so, and there can be frustration when it&#8217;s impossible to carry something through to its logical conclusion. I am not complaining about the seeming interruptions and distractions. I feel lucky to have a job that calls on different capacities and is never boring &#8211; not for one second &#8211; and I find all the items that cross my agenda engaging, challenging, and fascinating. And I certainly would never say or assume that any or all of these details are more compelling than those that arise during your own work day; I just feel that they are idiosyncratically connected with being a music director in an American orchestra operating at the beginning of the 21st century, so I hope that they might be of interest to you.<\/p>\n<p>See you soon &#8230; I&#8217;ve got to read my kids a bedtime story.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"0in 0in 0pt;\">(For more information on Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, visit <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nyphil.org\/\"><span style=\"Times New Roman;\">nyphil.org<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"0in 0in 0pt;\">\u00a0<\/p>\n<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0;float:none;height:34px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=724\" send=\"false\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Alan Gilbert I\u00a0am not going to introduce this blog with a portentous statement about what it means to be a music director today. This isn&#8217;t going to be a philosophical platform. Rather, I think that people might be interested in going behind the scenes, to know what I imagine many would find to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":725,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions\/725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}