During the summers of 1980 and 1981, I was hired by the Monadnock Music Festival to manage production and design lighting for productions of Don Giovanni and Armida (reviews here and here).  They were fantastically innovative productions directed by the then-enfant-terrible Peter Sellars … but it’s not them I want to talk about.

The Monadnock Music Festival was primarily a chamber-music festival that made use of a slew of very, very talented classical musicians from Boston (while I was there I worked with 3 future Naumburg Award winners, as well as with John Adams and John Harbison).  Repertory-style, they performed a bunch of unusual chamber-music offerings in churches and town halls throughout southern New Hampshire.  It was an extremely eclectic mix, chosen by the Festival’s director, Jim Bolle, whose knowledge of the outer bounds of the repertory was nothing short of astonishing.

Most pieces were performed more than once, in different locations, with the same players.   I spent a lot of evenings turning pages for people, or just sitting in a pew listening.  And inevitably, back at Monadnock HQ, there would be a lively discussion among the musicians about how a piece had gone, how it should go the next time, and so on — a post-game discussion among very talented professionals.  As a way to learn how musicians think, it was an invaluable set of compare-and-contrast exercises, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a better educational experience in music.

But I just found something that comes close.  I’ve had the Miles Davis “Cellar Door Sessions” album for a while, but it had never occurred to me to sit down and listen to all the performances of a particular song one after the other.   The most striking example of evolution is the series of performances of “What I Say” — I’ve assembled them into a YouTube playlist linked below, but you can also find them on Spotify.   

Listening to them is a pure exercise in listening to a bunch of extraordinarily talented musicians figure out how to play a particular piece, even as they work out that often less is more.   I’d suggest starting out by listening to the last one in the series up to the point where Miles makes his first entrance — just to get a sense for where things ended up — and then going back to the first one and working through in order.   

It’ll be worth the hour it takes.

The playlist is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbTlq0hI61r90AhC35IjlDYrCMv0uOSG7