Maestro’s Musings: The Universal Non-Language

One of the extraordinary blessings of a conducting career is the opportunity to function within a wide array of cultures (and accents). From New Yawk “fuggedaboudit” to Noaf Kah-lah-na “Ah do declayuh,” from Bastn “Pack the Ka” and of course to Minnesoooota “Oofdah!!!”; I’ve usually managed to communicate with the natives.

But a recent engagement in Korea had me scrambling. How do I rehearse an orchestra when we have no language in common? Now there IS a lingua franca of classical music, to a limited extent: basic tempo and dynamic indications are all conveyed in Italian. So for “softer” (più piano) and “slower” (meno mosso) I was covered. But how to let the musicians know to what passage I was referring, or where in the piece they should start up playing again?

Easy….just learn Korean numbers. Hana, dul, set, net, deosot….hana, dul, set, net, deosot…one, two, three, four, five….and on up to ten. Got it. And then ten to twenty. And even up to 100. No problem.

Problem. There are two sets of numbers in Korean. No kidding. I learned one. And wouldn’t you know it, for bar numbers they use the other set: il, i, sam, sa, o. After a valiant last-minute crash course on the new numbers I moved on to the niceties: hello, goodbye, thank you, please. Ah, but there’s that nasty cultural context thing. My “thank you” (goMAwayo) uttered proudly to the orchestra manager and others would usually elicit a laugh, or at least a genial smile. I chalked it up to delight that an American guest would learn a Korean word. I learned several days later that in fact it signifies “Thanks, inferior one.” Gulp!

As the week moved on, so did my Korean, to the point of maximal pride — a joke in Korean! At a rehearsal, to better balance the soloist I reduced the size of the orchestra, releasing a handful of string players from the back of the sections. As they were packing up I bowed, and said, most solemnly: Annyonghi Kaseyo…“Farewell, Honored ones.” It’s difficult to imagine a warmer human connection than from a joke in a language that everyone knows you don’t speak.

But there IS an even warmer connection: the non-language of music. Language uses sounds to represent things: numbers, objects, or feelings, for example. Music uses sounds to bring us to a most profound, pure self-knowledge…a kind of personal exaltation. A person who experiences the sounds in this way can have the ultimate individual experience; people who experience it at the same time, from the same sounds, share an ultimate human experience.

As a conductor, to be able to guide the sounds in a way that exalts a group of musicians from an entirely different culture, and to share this experience with an audience…this is an indescribably profound encounter with the essence of what it means to be alive in the world.
Until next month, then: Annyonghi Kaseyo.

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera; co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.