As she comes to the end of her second season with the Florida Orchestra, associate conductor Susan Haig continues her mission to demonstrate that orchestral music is really "popular" music.
I watch her do just that at a youth concert for hundreds of fourth and fifth graders. Leading the orchestra with precise, expressive gestures, smiling enthusiastically in her brown striped coat as she moves through Pictures at an Exhibition, she could be a top business executive overseeing a particularly fascinating board meeting.
But the message she's putting across is all about equivalence: "The Star-Spangled Banner" and Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony are equally rousing. Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony is as fundamentally exciting as John Williams' score from Jurassic Park. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony (1828) belongs on the same program with Jeffrey Ryan's Visions of Joy (1997).
The students listen with rapt attention. When Haig asks how many are hearing the Florida Orchestra for the first time, most raise their hands. At the finale she says, "We want to see you often in the future." The unstated tagline: "Now that you know how much fun this is."
A few days later, I sit down with Haig in the orchestra's South Tampa boardroom. The ostensible reason: to preview the three concerts she's leading in the coming week. At 11 a.m. on Thurs., May 5 there's a St. Petersburg coffee concert featuring Weber's "Invitation to the Dance" and excerpts from Schubert's Symphony No. 8 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. Then at 7 p.m. she leads a free outdoor concert at Tampa's Middleton High School, coupling music of Beethoven, Grieg and Tchaikovsky with selections from Fiddler on the Roof, the Beach Boys, and the Star Wars Suite. The orchestra repeats the program 7:45 p.m. Sat., May 8 at Clearwater's Coachman Park. Again, the performance is free; this time there'll be fireworks.
But my real reason for talking with Haig is simply to sound her out on what I see as the uncertain status of orchestral music today. I've spoken on the subject with music director Stefan Sanderling, and I enjoyed his passionate opinions about the orchestra's continued relevance. But what will Haig say? When we first sit down, she asks about me, my background, credentials. Then, when she's satisfied she knows whom she's speaking to, she lets me conduct the interview.
And what I discover is a contradiction: a Princeton graduate with several postgraduate degrees who's committed to demolishing the elitist aura of orchestral music. She's intellectual and combative and convinced that concert music – please don't use the misleading term "classical music," she insists – is for every average Joe. No matter where our conversation wanders, it always comes back to this predominant theme: Concert music can be enjoyed by anyone. All claims to the contrary are uninformed, the fruits of inexperience.
And she wants me to know that any ideas I might have about public resistance to an evening at symphony are already mistaken. "We've had many sellouts," she says. "I counted up, you know; we did an outdoor parks concert in Vinoy Park, there were I think 19,000 people. The police, the parks people, said it was the biggest crowd they'd ever seen. So I kind of added up, it looks like we've touched maybe 100,000 people just in outreach concerts alone this year and that doesn't include the subscription concerts. So my sense is that there's a huge potential audience and that there's loads of people out there who are excited about hearing the orchestra and just need to be brought in."
I ask her about what strikes me as the unpopularity of a lot of post-19th century concert music and she tries to persuade me that I'm mistaken. I persevere: name a great writer of orchestral music thriving today. "John Williams," she answers. "It's great orchestral music. And the whole world knows it."
Surprised, I counter that Williams isn't taken seriously by many music lovers. "That's again because of the label," she answers. "When you say 'classical,' you don't allow people to understand the variety of musics that are being written for orchestra today … Film music is one way to use an orchestra, so is ethnic dance music, so is Paquito D'Rivera.
"I mean, the kids who went to that educational concert heard music by Jennifer Higdon, a composer from Philadelphia; they heard music by Paquito D'Rivera; they heard John Williams. And they didn't hear the Florida Orchestra say, 'Now, we're going to do something less serious.' We gave it the same value and commitment. So that's what you have to train people to understand."
In other words, overturn the idea that Beethoven and Williams come from different universes, and we'll all become more avid, satisfied listeners.
But I still want to know how Haig explains public reluctance to orchestral music; she counters by citing evidence of its popularity. After all, she reminds me, 40,000 fourth and fifth graders enjoyed educational concerts last year. Don't they count? And yes, there are people who erroneously believe that they won't enjoy an orchestral concert, but that's because newspaper writers and editors continue to call such music "classical," "which says a) it's not contemporary, b) it's not current, and c) it's not popular."
Change that bad habit and the public, no longer perceiving the concert hall as a musty museum, will give the orchestra a try. And "as soon as they experience something," she says, "it breaks through any misperception they had." Which is not to say that lovers of Beethoven and Mahler won't also be satisfied; but "just keep your ears open for other stuff too, that's all."
"Other stuff" – that seems the key to Haig's philosophy. "All of life is expressed through music," she asserts, "so how can one limit the ways and say, 'Well, it ought to be all happening this way?'"
Bach and Duke Ellington, Beethoven and the Beatles, it's all there at the Florida Orchestra, along with new works by composers you'll be hearing for the first time. So widen your expectations. Dissolve your preconceptions. Experience concert music in its remarkable inclusiveness.
Susan Haig has a mission: to get you to forget what you think you know and discover the real joy, the up-to-the-minute pertinence of orchestral music.
And she's sure that once you do, there'll be no turning back.
This article appears in May 4-10, 2005.
