The Gary Burton Trio

That's certainly the general image. But there's a dark side of orchestras that most people don't know about -- a strange political battle between orchestra members and conductors. The members of the orchestra are constantly harassing and challenging the conductor, doing anything they can to try to mess him up, including very childish things. It's almost like they defy the conductor to make them tow the line. It's very common.

Is that the musical equivalent of corporate alienation?

One of my classical friends, a violin soloist, experienced this when she was guesting at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic.

She went to rehearsal and there was Zubin Mehta conducting and the players were being incredibly disrespectful. They weren't paying attention, they were talking to each other, listening to the ballgame on the radio. She turned to one of her friends and said, "I had no idea things were this bad. " He said, "We're all on good behavior tonight because you're here. "

Gamesmanship like that is fairly familiar in corporations. What accounts for it in orchestras?

I guess it's a psychological thing: because the conductor literally has all the control, the players then abdicate. They've been disempowered, as they say in the business world. I know it sounds exactly like the corporate environment : "I just type whatever they give me. It's none of my business whether it's all wrong or not, or whether I could make a suggestion. Every time I make a suggestion, nobody cares anyway, so let them stew in their own juice. " It turns out the same thing applies to a large corporate structure or a symphony orchestra.

Can an Old Manager Learn New Riffs?

Businesses say they want their traditional management teams to become as spontaneous and improvisational as a good jazz combo. How hard is it to teach a classical musician to feel comfortable improvising?

It's a very difficult transition for someone who has been a typical classical musician for decades. A lot of my classical music friends say to me, "I'd love to be able to improvise. Tell me how to do it. You're a teacher -- help me out. "

It's not out of the question. But I have to tell them, "You'll learn a process, you'll understand it, but you'll have to unlearn or replace a lot of ingrained habits. "

It turns out that classically trained musicians are the toughest ones to teach. It's easier to teach somebody who's a beginning musician. Performing music -- or managing in a company, for that matter -- is all about developing habits and ways of doing things that your unconscious mind controls. A very modest example of this would be the way people learn to play the piano. You don't start out for the first year saying, "This year we're going to start using just these two fingers and get good at that, and then next year go to four fingers. " You don't work your way up to ten because that would mean relearning your concept of how to function on the instrument all over again. You learn one way of doing it and that becomes your natural, spontaneous physical connection to the process.

The Discipline of Spontaneity

One of the paradoxes of improvisation is that it's a mixture of two opposites -- tremendous discipline and regimen balanced by spontaneity, listening, and playing in the moment. We spend countless hours going over and over things, trying to learn parts, trying to get our playing perfected. We practice exercises, we play the passage repeatedly until we can get it right, and then as soon as we get that one right we move on to another one and start doing it over and over again. Every musician puts in anywhere from an hour to several hours a day for years just to get their basic craft organized. Now that kind of experience is highly regimented -- it's totally lacking in spontaneity.

At the same time, musicians have a highly developed instinct to be spontaneous. When something in us says, "Do it!" we're able to just go ahead and do it. As a musician you have to be able to live by those spontaneous instincts or you simply become nonfunctional. One of the things I suspect about the colorful behavior of musicians, whether classical, jazz, or rock, is that it's a way to shake off all that regimen and get back in touch with the raw emotion of music.

Are there techniques you use with students to try to teach them to be spontaneous?

I tell them to use their ears instead of their brains. If I'm working with a student, I'll play something and tell them to play something back to me. Respond to it. React to it. Don't stop and study it. Answer it. Make musical conversation happen.