It took me quite a bit of time to write this post: I learnt of Maestro Farberman passing before it became public knowledge but I was pleased to see it got some decent coverage on the internet.
Maestro Farberman could be a dividing personality and quite naturally the net flourished with a plethora of comments from both supporters and detractors. Whoever knows me a bit, knows how close I was to Maestro Farberman, and I still am mourning his inevitable death.
Harold’s contribution to the teaching of the art of conducting is unparalleled: I met him in 2000 for the summer institute at Bard, to which my Italian conducting teacher, Gilberto Serembe, had referred me to. He scrutinized me at the first “hello” and then proceeded for the whole time I was there to break my young arrogant ego bit by bit.
He was “old-school” in his way of teaching, without any of this idiotic pats-on-the-back-no-matter-what we have to endure today in name of the politically correct. Maestro Farberman was all about cutting the nonsense to zero and focus on what really mattered: the music. We, as conductors, are there to serve it, not the other way around.
I’ve seen dozens of students stepping down the podium in tears, of shame or anger: some of them understood the value of the lesson, other, simply, did not. These often turned out to be the very worst kind of conductors: the ones who think they know everything when in fact know very little and blame the orchestra for their own mistakes: two points that Harold stressed enormously.
At Bard, July 2016
He used to get incredibly angry towards students who would step on the podium unprepared. And how could you blame him? It was a waste of time for everyone, and disrespectful to both the music and the players.
Harold’s focus on the music led him to deeply analyze the various conducting “techniques” students and guest teachers alike would present to him: unapologetically, he wouldn’t make a difference between one or the other. I remember a guest teacher showing a (really ineffective) opening of the second movement of Beethoven 9: his gestures were way too unclear for what he was trying to do, and of course, he went into a 5-minutes long rambling of what the players were supposed to do and/or understand. Maestro Farberman stepped up with his little pencil/baton, showed it instead of talking, and after a perfect opening said to us students: “If you want to try to be fancy, do it as he does; if you want the orchestra to be together, do it as I do.” Of course, this kind of attitude did not win him many friends. But that’s not what he was there for.
Listen, and learn: those were the requirements of a student. Knowing his background and what kind of music giants he walked with, I would say that that would be the only smart thing to do: listen and learn. Refuse and he would get upset. Not so much because you refused to listen to him, but because you were robbing another student’s space, who would have been willing to take what he had to offer.
I’ve heard and read so many negative comments towards him, mostly addressed to his character rather than his teaching. I suspect many of these comments come from students who did not get praised by him for their doing and were/are not really used to being exposed to truthful and open criticism.
Let me tell you: standing on the podium while a Maestro of his stature criticizes you and then getting an extra round from the orchestra players as well is not fun. It’s also invaluable: he created an environment where it was safe to fail and where one could actually experiment and learn what was working and what wasn’t.
I didn’t really enjoy my first summer with him: of course not! He demanded a complete change of perspective. “Forget what you’ve learnt and start from scratch” can be quite a hard statement to accept. Naturally, it wasn’t to be taken literally, but I was too young to understand that. So, like many, I fought against it. However, something sank in. Secretly, I tried to apply some of his teachings during the winter, during my conducting lessons in Italy. I thought they wouldn’t work, “the orchestra at Bard is trained for
The building opened in 2003. In 2004 we performed “The Song of Eddie“: a new opera by Harold Farberman. I was his assistant and was supposed to conduct one performance. I ended up conducting all of them: his doctor told him his heart would have not been able to take the pressure. I will never forget his tears. Music, in conducting or composing, was his life.
Ten years later, I brought him the score of my own opera, Camille Claudel: the fun fact is that the lead singer of my work was soprano Violetta Lazin, daughter of tenor James McCray who had played Ken in Harold’s opera The Losers, in 1971.
He was one of the most generous, kind and honest people I have ever met. Goodbye Maestro, you are incredibly missed.
Harold Farberman – A short biography
Harold Farberman has conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras, among them the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, the Philharmonia, the BBC Symphony, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Stockholm Philharmonic, the Danish Radio Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Orchestra, the Hessischer Rundfunk, the RAI in Rome, the Mozarteum Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the KBS, the Seoul Philharmonic, and the Sydney and Melbourne Symphonies in Australia.
Upon graduating from The Julliard School of Music in New York, Mr. Farberman was invited to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a percussionist/timpanist. At the time he was the youngest player ever to become a full-time member of the orchestra. He resigned in 1963 to devote his energy to conducting and composing. In 1966 he was appointed principal guest conductor of the Denver Symphony Orchestra, subsequently becoming the music director and conductor of the Colorado Springs Symphony from 1967 to 1970, and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra from 1971 to 1979.
Conducting students at Tanglewood in 1960, Harold Farberman, Seiji Ozawa, Diego Pacheco with conductor Eleazar de Carvalho, ca. 1960.
As a recording artist, Mr. Farberman has recorded more of Charles Ives’ works than any other conductor and is the only person to date to have recorded all four of that composer’s symphonies.
The Losers - interview
A prolific composer, Mr. Farberman counts orchestral works, chamber music, concertos, ballet music, film scores, song cycles, and two operas among his compositions. His opera, The Losers, written in 1970, was commissioned by The Julliard School of Music and premiered at Lincoln Center the following year.
Mr. Farberman has been a tireless advocate on behalf of conductors. He founded the Conductors Guild in 1976 and served two terms as its first president; it now has 2,000 members. He established countrywide workshops for young conductors when he served as a member of the American Symphony Orchestra League Board in the 1970’s. He is the founder and director of the widely acclaimed Conductor’s Institute, a summer conducting program initiated at the Hartt School where he was Professor of Conducting and in later years relocated to Bard College.
Sources and resources:
The losers
In an interview with Charles Amirkhanian composer Harold Farberman discusses his opera “The Losers,” which was premiered on March 26, 1971, at the Juilliard Opera Theater, Lincoln Center, to an astonished audience which witnessed the saga of a motorcycle gang complete with chain whippings and
The original interview can be found here: https://archive.org/details/AM_1971_05_30
Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives: conducting students at Tanglewood
I was never a student of Farberman. I played a couple of times in the orchestra of his summer orchestra to make some extra money to supplement my scholarship to study in NYC. Since then I have played as an orchestral musician in a major orchestra in the US and currently in Europe. I stopped mostly for one thing: I could not stand Farberman. I have never seen anything like a Farberman’s class: the verbal abuse towards the students, the absurdness of his conducting ideas (never encountered that any of the world-leading conductors I have played for), and the reverence by a group of now minor-league conductors and some of the orchestra’s musicians coming to play to Bard from some of the worst per-service orchestras in America. For these persons Farberman was some sort of creature sent by God to enlighten them… obviously they did not know any better. The orchestra sounded better with Farberman? Of course, it did: orchestras always sound better when the abusive conductor or the teacher is conducting. It is a reflex, to play better. It is not only that he was difficult, rude, and abusive, it is that he was a conductor who never was music or principal director of a major conductor and appeared seldomly with orchestras abroad. He used to brag that he conducted the LSO: well, it was always a recording (never a season concert) and the recording was paid by him (the LSO did not invite HIM to record with them). So please, let’s be serious and let’s not talk about Farberman as if he was a music hero and the best teacher on earth, because for every person who thinks he was a world wonder I can find you five musicians now more experienced, educated, and travelled than the, who would tell you otherwise.
I’m always intrigued by this kind of comments: most of them inevitably fall into a void critique to mask a lack of argument.
Let’s break this down: you stopped playing in the orchestra (at Bard I assume) because you did not like him. Very well, but I doubt that he was there to be liked by you or anybody else. What you failed to see is that he was there to teach, nothing more, nothing less. The fact that he wasn’t up high in a popularity contest because some students felt like he was hurting their feelings it’s completely irrelevant. I didn’t like him the first summer I went there basically because my ego took a hit. It has nothing to do with abusiveness. It has to do with the will to learn and accept that there’s a different way of doing things. If you went to him as student expecting to be petted on your back just because you paid a fee you were in the wrong place, especially if you were unwilling to try new things and get out of your comfort zone. You might have stopped going as a player but plenty of conductors kept coming back over the years.
Yes, I know, those conductors, according to you, are the minor league groupies, which brings, among others, someone like Marin Alsop in the same circle. By the way, she teaches in a masterclass that you can find online exactly what he taught her.
Absurdness of his conducting ideas: which ones exactly? The fact that a conductor should not be a mere time beater? Or that he/she should know the score? Or perhaps that conductors should not blame the players for their shortcomings? Are you maybe referring to some technical aspect in particular? Pitch registration or use of the wrist? In any of these cases, I would recommend reading both Heinrich Schenker and Hermann Scherchen’s writing on conducting. They introduced these concepts more than a century ago. And if you want to see them in action you can take a look at Carlos Kleiber or Georges Pretre who incorporated them in their own way, unless, of course, you consider them to be minor league conductors as well.
What Farberman did was to develop a technique that would enable conductors to depict the music with their hands instead of beating time endlessly. You play in a major orchestra: do you honestly want to sell me the idea that without a time beater you are unable to play or that you prefer that to someone that shows you the music? Please, that is so ridiculous and detached from reality that nobody will believe it. What you need is a pulse, not a beat. And a pulse does not need to be constricted in a pattern. Patterns are not conducting: so absurd! Where did I hear that again aside from Farberman? Oh, that’s right, another minor league conductor: Leonard Bernstein.
I don’t even want to go into the whole LSO thing: but again, really? So, in order to be a great conductor one must be popular with top orchestras? I guess that would make Bocelli the greatest tenor of all times.
Besides, Farberman’s recordings of Ives and Mahler were regarded for decades as some of the best ever made (do some digging, you’ll find more than a critic saying that).
You want to be serious, let’s be serious: make an argument that is not based simply on you liking or disliking his character. And if you really want to be taken seriously, I would suggest you begin by using your name instead of hiding behind a nickname.
“The orchestra sounded better with Farberman? Of course, it did: orchestras always sound better when the abusive conductor or the teacher is conducting.” That is so shallow it’s not even funny. Did it ever occur to you that the orchestra sounded better because he was the teacher and knew what he was doing and how to do it? That’s what he was there for, teach other people how to do the same. Instead of just talking the talk, he could actually walk the walk.
Quite obviously, you are one of those players who think conducting is just about beating time and not bothering you so you wouldn’t have to think too much. Seek help. By the way, I do remember you very clearly. I also remember your comments, often out of scope and of no use to the students. Eat a piece of humble pie, it will help you become a better musician, if you care about music at all.
You clearly have no idea of what you’re talking about. I pity you and your shallowness which you’re trying to mask with arrogance. Get real, man!