On Shaping Sound and Expressivity
photo credit: Marco Borggreve
Tianyi Lu is an internationally renowned conductor currently serving as Conductor-in-Residence with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in Norway and Principal Conductor of the St Woolos Sinfonia in the UK. She recently guest conducted the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) in a program featuring works by Behzad Ranjbaran, Resa Abaee, Katia Makdissi-Warren, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Following the dress rehearsal, Lu took a moment to discuss her approach to conducting and the significance of timbre and orchestration in shaping musical narratives. In this interview, Lu shares her insights on the creative process, drawing from her extensive experience collaborating with diverse orchestras and composers worldwide. She explores the role of timbre and orchestration in evoking emotions and immersing audiences in the musical experience, offering a unique perspective on the art of conducting.
[Stephen McAdams]. If you think of Klangfarbe in German, it's orchestration that is basically playing with sound colors. What does this word timbre mean to you? And what is its role in orchestration practice from your standpoint as a conductor?
[Tianyi Lu]. I started off being a composer, so I was taught about timbre and color as a way into composition. However, it I think it's a really complex idea because every acoustic is different. Every instrument is different. You cannot say a cello playing a D on the middle string is going to always have this color. So it's kind of a nebulous, unclear concept. For me, as a conductor, I always think of the effect that it has on the listener, rather than trying to work out exactly which harmonics are sounding and exactly what the wavelengths of a sonograph might look like. How does it affect me physically? How does it affect me emotionally? How does it conjure up a narrative or a particular feeling or character or impetus to move in a certain way? As a conductor, I react very physically to sound, so when I hear certain harmonies, certain timbres, it can actually feel like it's resonating in different parts of my body. And I would say that when I'm conducting, I am connecting with those areas that are resonant or have some kind of connection with that sound. And I'm trying to create that with the musicians. Of course, every orchestra I visit will have a particular sound related to the way they play, the particular makeup of that orchestra, and the acoustic that they are used to playing in. For example, the Vienna Philharmonic will have this particular sound. The Berlin Philharmonic has a particular sound which has changed over the ages. And of course, you have American orchestras of so many different sorts versus German orchestras versus British BBC Radio orchestras. They all have a particular sound based on the instruments that they play and the traditions that they play, the way that they play. As a conductor, when I look at a score, I am always thinking about what the meaning behind the colors that are being created is.
So you can then adjust those when you're in a particular hall with a particular orchestra to get where you want to get to.
A lot of my work is about finding the effect of the emotion that I'm looking for. So if I give an example at the end of the Rimsky-Korsakov. We all know he was a master orchestrator. It didn't work all the time, but nine times out of ten you can learn a lot from him, and I think there is always a reason why he puts certain instruments together. And there's always a narrative reason. At the end of the second movement where you have the 1st and 2nd violins, double notes, and you have the harp, it's very light at pianissimo, and it’s a shimmering color. It's very high, there's a lot of harmonics because they are playing tremolo. So there's a lot of movement against the strings. You have the sound of the harp, which is quite light. And there's no sustain. It's very transparent and sort of like a veil. I tried to conjure up images for the musicians because they were playing it quite heavy, and it didn't create this feeling of magic. And also this sense of the loud banging and crashing that has gone on before moves into this kind of ending, which is ethereal. For me it's creating this feeling in the listener of “Oh we’ve just finished this crazy storm and now we have this arrival point where maybe the sun has come out.” So that's the kind of feeling, and if I hear the orchestra playing very heavy, I don't get that feeling and therefore ask them to not only do what's in the score, but I may even ask them, “Maybe you can play it like more like a tremolo, right rather than [sings duh duh duh duh duh duh duh with heavier articulation], but to feel it more like [sings ju ju ju ju ju ju ju ju more sofly and lighter].” So I try to use a lot of imagery to help the music get the technique that they're looking for.
That makes a lot of sense. There was an example working with Jean-Francois Rivest who’s the conductor of the Orchestre de l’Université de Montreal. We were doing a big project with sound recording looking at the influence of the hall and the kind of recordings you can do. And he was playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th. He had them play it, and we recorded it. Then he said, “now I want you to imagine you're walking on a bridge of ice.” And that changed everything. I mean, physically, acoustically, you can measure that everybody played differently, and it is really fascinating. I think this idea of image is very important as well.
And it's also tricky. I said a couple of really weird metaphors, and I didn't even know how they came out. They’re just sort of plucked from thin air and don't make sense a lot of the time. But I find that we do have a kind of instinctive understanding of how sound relates to the physical environment. And this is something that I was taught as a conductor by Ken Kiesler. He was one of the first conducting teachers that I did a master class with. He's an American teacher, and he talked about the tree trunk being very solid, doesn't move much, and then the branches and leaves move more. So as a physical form, if you have something really large, the trunk of the body shouldn't move too much. The arms move a little bit more, and then hopefully the leaves, the fingers, the tip of the baton. In some ways, it should all be proportional. However, you know, once you actually study conducting technique, that should all go out the window. But what I think he was trying to say is that generally if you have a bigger instrument, it will produce a lower sound in nature; that is an elephant will have a lower sound, a bigger sound, a lion will have a bigger roar than a mouse, which is a smaller instrument like a piccolo. So we already have these instinctive ideas of high and quick and fast, which has a certain kind of texture and feeling and likeness. You hear my voice? I'm already a little bit higher and with joy and bubbles. It has a certain emotional direction. And heaviness, we talk about being depressed. We talk about heaviness, and you hear that if it's a low sound. It conjures up certain emotions, but then you add in harmony. You add in melody and then it changes everything.
“I'm always trying to find the right balance, and words sometimes are quite limited in describing it. So I can only show through the way I conduct. And sometimes that means that I move like a feather might move to create a lighter sound in order to create the way they move the bow across the string.”
I think it's interesting that you're talking about these different kinds of feelings because when I was watching the way you're using your body, this comes across very clearly. There are times where it's like this [gestures] and you're getting that out of the orchestra, and then other times where things are more [gesture] when you like put down the baton and start waving. And all of that is shaping the sound in very interesting ways.
I find that in my conducting, people say I'm very balletic, and I used to hate that because I'm not dancing. I'm really trying to create sound. But instinctively, I move to music. So trying to suppress that instinct is also not very helpful. It's actually why I decided to conduct, because I do feel very physically connected to sound and sometimes you really can create magic, as in the third movement of the Rimsky-Korsakov from the beginning where you have [sings theme], I wanted something just a little bit less. You know, the first time they played it on Wednesday, it was very intense and beautiful, like warm, rich. A lot of recordings have this. But the score also says Andante Quasi Allegretto, and no conductor I know from every single recording really takes the tempo that Rimsky-Korsakov writes, which is a lot faster than most recordings. I just think you lose so much of the innocence because it's about the Prince and the Princess. Who knows what the story was about, but it is young love. It's not like married for 40 years. It's innocence, his first love [sings theme in a more sprightly manner]. And so of course I didn't want to lose the beautiful quality of the strings because they used a lot of vibrato. They were really connected with the string in the way that they played, and it was beautiful. And it spoke of love and that warmth. We feel warm when we hear a warm sound. But at the same time, it needed a kind of dance-like quality as well. So I'm always trying to find the right balance, and words sometimes are quite limited in describing it. So I can only show through the way I conduct. And sometimes that means that I move like a feather might move to create a lighter sound in order to create the way they move the bow across the string. I think a really great path into understanding conducting is thinking about the way the instruments are creating the sound. This is not really taught in most conducting schools, at least in most of the conducting classes I've been to. They don't really talk about color enough. They talk about being together. But if you think about music, we're not robots. We're not lining up notes so that they are perfectly together.
Hopefully not.
And this idea of being together, the more you want the thing to be together, the more it's not going to be together. And somehow the more you can really imagine the color of the sound. So when I say color, I mean, for example, there might be a pizzicato in the basses [sings bom] at the same time as the chord in the horns. And you have to somehow find the [sings boooooo], the very pure tone in the horns and this [bom], which is a little bit percussive, but it's not a moment in time. It's not the [stom]. That will sound very dry. You want this and what kind of pizzicato do you want, do you want this feeling of a heart going [bom]? It has a sense of arrival. It has a little tail. You have to have the sense of momentum going into the pizzicato, but you also have to let the horns go [boo], and they have a lot of tubing and they create the sound going [mmmuh]. So it's not like they can go [mooaa]. So they cannot go [bo bo bo bom (rapidly)] and it's very [bom]. So then you have to really feel the pizzicato in your body at the same time as the horns. Sometimes a very big chord in the whole orchestra. The piccolo who goes [pii very high-pitched] and the violins who go [ziii] are very direct with very thin strings, very fast air speed, pianissimo. And they have to go really quickly. And it's a very immediate sound. Whereas the tuba at the same time has to go [very low muffled bua bua bo] five hours later. Yes, and they have to play at the same time. Now, if you just go as in most orchestra conducting lessons, they just say “all you have to do is be very predictable. Like a ball falling through the air. Gravity. You go up and down and everyone's going to play at the same time.” Guess what? That's not going to happen. And this is one of the most elusive things about color because you can want something to be together. But you have to have the right painting and the right texture. It's like trying to paint something watercolor with a very thin brush and making sure that it happens and lands on the page at exactly the same time as a huge brush that you normally maybe use. Do you know what I mean? But you have to find the same color at the same time. And so I think that is the greatest challenge for a conductor. A great conductor understands color and has the color in his or her body, and that somehow, if you know the exact kind of envelope of sound, it helps the musicians play together more than just insisting that it has to be together in a very kind of clinical scientific time way.
I think there's also the issue of getting blends of various kinds. And when you want to build up complex textures with multiple instruments. There's a lot of that in the second piece. For example, with all these sort of shimmering textures between the high winds and the strings. You're having to get the togetherness, but also the colors have to approach each other in a certain sense, and then also the balance is very important for the global color. So there's each instrument’s color contributing to the whole. And that's why I think one of the things that is really fascinating in orchestration is balance. You were mentioning it earlier. It's crucial to get that feeling you're talking about.
A big part of the conductor's job is balance. For a chord with a third in the middle, if you have too much of the third, if it's too high then it will sound very bright. If you have something with a bit more of the tonic, it will sound different. And so therefore a lot of the time I ask the musicians if we can have a little bit of the lower note. A lot of the time you have first and second violins doubling the same melody. This is really important. Often composers only write the melody for one group of strings, and if you look at Rimsky-Korsakov most of the time he gives it to both 1st and 2nd violins. Or first violins and celli or celli and violas. It's never one section, because usually it's doubled with winds. So you have celli often doubled with bassoon and clarinet. This is all textbook orchestration stuff, but the reason for that is that you have a little bit of core in the sound. Because I think when we listen to something, we don't just hear the sound, we have to hear the color. And even Beethoven’s 5th, you know the very beginning [bah bah bah baam]. You think it's just strings, but he adds in clarinets, but you don't hear the clarinets. But if they're not there, it doesn't have the same impact. So I think this is so important that when we are studying orchestration, we actually read the score because you sometimes hear something like, “Oh yeah, that's just the solo flute.” But actually it's doubled by the bassoon. And then you can really play with “Can we have a bit more bassoon, less flute?” Who's got the main line? If you have more bassoon, less flute, then you have something a bit richer that might be at the top of the bassoon register. It has a very sonorous quality. So then a lot of the job of the conductor is balance for sure, and that definitely has a huge impact on the color.
“I think a lot in terms of food. This is another thing. We talk about synesthesia because we say color is visual. And yet we hear color. And I think you heard me say in rehearsal, it needs to be like corn flakes, crunchy. And I think of this bassoon and woodblock sound as something like cake, it's got that cake texture. It's not super crunchy. But I do think a lot in terms of the texture of something as well. It's weird, but I love food!”
How about doublings of sustained instruments and impulsive instruments that are percussive or plucked or struck? That's always a trick.
It's always challenging for an ensemble because the movement is so different. You think about a piano or a timpani. You have this downward movement. And then if we use painting as an allegory, it's kind of like you have a very broad brush stroke, say the strings, and then you add the piano. It's kind of like someone taking a very sharp coloring pencil and outlining the line. So then it's great because suddenly it pops out, so you know it's really useful to have a percussive instrument outlining this and Rimsky-Korsakov does it a lot in the last movement of Scheherazade. And you have a doubling in the snare drum or the tambourine [tchi tchi] or the triangle. And it just highlights, pings it out because even though no matter how hard the woodwinds play, I can tell them all day “Can we have more articulation?” But you have that distance and the way they're creating the sound through a column of air is never going to have the same effect as a downward movement of the percussion. However, then it becomes challenging because of the percussion being slightly late then it’s really obvious.
And their attack is sharper too.
It's very sharp, and so they get told all the time, “You're late, you're late, you're late.” And actually, if you sit where the percussion are sitting, nine times out of 10 they're perfectly in time but because of the distance, it just needs a few meters and immediately it stands behind and it's much more unforgiving than you know a little string sweep. You can kind of creep in without anyone noticing.
Percussion can also ground a little. I noticed in the first piece you played by Behzad Ranjbarran. There was the bassoon and wood block which was a gorgeous choice. The way it was punctuating the bassoon notes, you can still hear it was two instruments, but it was adding something that really gave the bassoon a little bit more punch.
It popped out and was really interesting. Then we can talk about the materials of the instrument, because you've got wood, you've got strings, you’ve got metal in the past, and then you also have brass, which is a very metallic. And interestingly the wood block and the bassoons are naturally made out of wood. And somehow it goes right.
It really works.
Because he could have written it for glockenspiel, but it just had this kind of almost haunting, very rustic feeling.
The roundness of the sound.
Right, kind of like a pastel colour rather than something more oil. And also, I think a lot in terms of food. This is another thing. We talk about synesthesia because we say color is visual. And yet we hear color. And I think you heard me say in rehearsal, it needs to be like corn flakes, crunchy. And I think of this bassoon and woodblock sound as something like cake, it's got that cake texture. It's not super crunchy. But I do think a lot in terms of the texture of something as well. It's weird, but I love food!
I'm wondering about several things, particularly in the second piece by Katia Makdissi-Warren and also in the Scheherazade. There's a lot of textures, global textures that get built up by several instruments, and I'm wondering how you approach putting those together. In rehearsals, are you taking bits apart so people can hear what another person's doing so that they know they can try to harmonize in some sense?
Absolutely. If I have time. We had two rehearsals today and then one rehearsal Wednesday. That's it. I try not to break things down too much in rehearsals. For example, if I wanted more brass in a woodwind chord, I look at the brass or I show the winds less. Or perhaps the winds have the melody. You know a lot of the time in the Rimsky-Korsakov, the top winds have the melody. But the horns are just harmony, playing in rhythmic unison with the winds. And so obviously you want to hear the melody more. So I did say at some point, “Less of the repeated note.” But I just have to say it once and then they understand, or I just look at the people who have the moving parts that are more interesting. In terms of rehearsing, if I have time and I really want to go into that detail, then I often build chords from the lower side or I would write down who has the tonic, who has the 5th, always tune the tonic first, then the fifth to find the openness, then add the third, then the seventh. I mean very typical choir kind of stuff, but I was trained as a chorister. So I think that always helps the musicians know who to listen to. In the beginning, if you have the contrabassoon and the double basses, and they can't agree on the same note, then who's right and who's wrong? You have to be very careful because again, intonation is a really nebulous concept. You can of course take out a tuner and say OK you're too sharp, too flat, but that's not how it works.
It's in a context.
Yes, A, it's context, and B, I agree that it also sometimes changes depending on what instruments are playing and it's really fascinating. So I never try and say you're too sharp, too high. I just say please listen to and tune to a particular instrument and that usually helps musicians do it themselves. Otherwise you start taking sides.