I'm such a hopeless case. I spent from Saturday through Tuesday auditing the master class in conducting at the Taipei Bach Festival. They are preparing the St John Passion for performance this weekend; roughly ten conductors were taking the class, learning to conduct the very difficult recitatives, and learning the way to look at the piece.
All the other auditors of the class were music professors or teachers, who were trying to pick up conducting technique. I spent the classes listening to the music, remembering how to read bass clef and a score at speed , watching Tom Davies train the conductors the first three days & Helmuth Rilling train the conductors and rehearse the soloists today, and trying to stay out of the way. (All four days, we all sat at the rear, as it were, of the orchestra / chorus, if we weren't the chorus ourselves, and so facing the conductor. Not great for balance, but wonderful for understanding the music, and for watching the training.)
Rilling and Davies are both great teachers. It was great to watch the conductors develop under Davies' guidance. I could see today that they had been prepared to really get the most from their work with Rilling. Rilling has spent his life conducting Bach --- he's recorded the complete chorale cycle twice! -- his knowledge of the music radiates from his eyes.
In addition, I got to use my Chinese, as all everyone attending was a Mandarin speaker except for Rilling and Davies. (Mostly just casual conversation of the form "what are you doing here? you do computer software? huh?" It was actually hard to answer, other than "I'm just very interested.")
The discussion of the Passion as a musical drama, and the relation between the text and the musical rhetoric got me thinking along the old philosophical lines. And all these chorus taking time off from work to come and sit in during the session on Monday made me think about the economics of music performance -- how much exactly does it cost in terms of hours of labor? I don't remember ever reading any discussion of this, and what it says about people's priorities, except for utilitarian tautologies such as "clearly they get more utility from making music than they would from working for money for a day".
Great fun for someone as hopelessly confused about priorities as I am: when in doubt, do everything.
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