October 13, 2021 (Ann Arbor, MI) — The Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra (A2SO) is pleased to announce a partnership with musicologist Cana McGhee, who will prepare program notes for all of the orchestra’s classical mainstage concerts across the 2021-2022 season.
Cana graduated from Emory University in 2019 with her BA in Music and French, after completing her thesis work on the song cycles of French composer Gabriel Fauré. She is now a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University, where her work focuses on musical engagements with natural science, climate change, and environmental activism. To find out more, visit www.canamcghee.com
The A2SO had the opportunity to sit down with Cana and ask more about her process when preparing program notes:
What are some of your objectives when preparing program notes, and how might a listener’s experience with a work be shaped by these considerations?
As a pianist and chorister, I’ve not attended many orchestra concerts in my day. When I did, I frequently went into a concert blindly, with little context for the composer, time frame, type of work; the list could go on. My solution for this lack of well-versed knowledge was listening and relying on the musical skill sets that I did have. Listening is the thing you’re asked to “merely” do at almost any western classical concert around the world today (it wasn’t always like that, though!). But it is often more difficult, more sensorial, and more intimate than we often think.
So, what I want to do with my program notes is strike a precarious balance. Namely, I want to communicate musical concepts or terminologies related to a piece’s structure, instrumentation, or other small-scale technical elements. I also want to describe what the music “does” and indicate the story it tells when there is a narrative to tell. And I also want to balance those aspects about concrete musical details with the background context that informs how the music might have existed in its original context. But above all, I want concertgoers to feel something. I want the program note to provide a sense of the piece even before the aural experience. I want audiences to be able to take a program home afterward as a written memory of what they heard.
Description vs prescription: how might effective notes offer a listening roadmap while allowing space for personal interaction and interpretation?
I do think of program notes as a roadmap of sorts, but perhaps not in the ways that most people expect. The idea of a “listening roadmap” usually suggests that the program note summarizes the music and acts like a Google Maps route through a piece. But this question about description vs. prescription is tough even for music scholars because we wrestle with it every day in our prose, presentations, and our teaching philosophies. Essentially, this is a question about whether there is one “right” way to interpret or engage with a piece of music. To me, the simple answer is a resounding no. All our previous encounters shape our present perceptions and understandings of the world, and each person brings different experiences to the concert hall.
I hope to never intend that the works can only be interpreted based on my presentation of them. I do my best to remain faithful to the music, and let my notes be guided by my ears. I see the program note as a space to begin actively considering a piece. As a known doodler in my everyday life, my own concert programs are rife with scribbled and smeared notes in the margins. That kind of active engagement signals a kind of playful interaction with the musical sounds in the air, and that deeper engagement is the ultimate aim of a concert anyway, right?
So, the program note is perhaps more of a fork in the road. Some of the paths ahead might be smoothly paved (i.e., the interpretation I provide), while others might be a little rocky or hazy or lined with brush (i.e., the interpretations that audience members imagine for themselves). But each path is valid. In my effort to write program notes that reproduce the feeling of a piece, I hope to plant enough seeds for listeners to create their own paths during their own moment of musical encounter.
What might be some themes in the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra’s 2021-2022 season that you’ll be looking to explore in your notes?
As I have studied cultural histories of music at this graduate level, I learn more and more that music is more than a bundle of notes, rhythms, and pitches. After all, sound is literally comprised of vibrations; so, music literally moves (through) us. As I continue to learn every day, musical and sonic phenomena have been leveraged for surprising ends: especially music that hovers within the western classical tradition. So, selfishly, this opportunity to write for the A2SO contributes to my goal of challenging the hegemonic ways that the western canon has been upheld as the pinnacle of music-making, at the expense of the diverse array of voices pushed to societal margins.
With that in mind, I am interested in teasing out themes about how music has been used to represent various aspects of identity-formation. Part of this also entails revealing how music represents ideas and ideologies, broadly construed. I am proud to be part of an organization who is prioritizing diversity and representation at all levels, especially in terms of the parties that concertgoers encounter most readily: compositional voices, musical idioms, and conductors on the podium. It is special to see the ways that music factors differently in people’s self-conceptions
How do you go about researching and writing a set of notes for a given concert?
I treat each program note like a mini research paper. The first place I go to is a score, a recording, or both. This is mainly to get a holistic sense of the sound world before diving into reception histories. Then I skim through several Google searches to get my bearings of what popular interest has been generated around a given piece or composer. For newer works, I also browse the composers’ websites to examine how they position themselves and their output. The RILM database is also a handy resource that I can access with my university credentials. Depending on the piece, RILM helps me find scholarly articles about particular compositional tricks a composer might have used. I do as much as I can to know the piece inside and out before feeling confident enough to provide any sort of commentary. But I promise it’s not as tedious as it sounds; maybe I’m only saying that, though, after years of practice…
In any case, once I have gotten a sense of each individual piece, the hardest part is deciphering how they hang together in a single concert. For the first concert, I chose to highlight the idea of dance as one among many possible unifying themes for the evening. This is not something you see in program notes all the time, but I think it’s useful, especially in a setting like an A2SO concert wherein contrasting time periods and sound worlds appear on the same program. This overarching connection provides an anchor point that supports my view of program notes as spaces of guided inspiration.