‘Keeping Score’

Documentarians Mix Classical Music With Intrigue To Titillate Modern Audiences

By John Voket

If one’s intense passion for a project marks its likelihood for continued success, the PBS series examining the musical creativity and sometimes unseemly aspects of an artist’s life and times may be in its infancy after just several well-received installments. The Keeping Score series, hosted by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, will eventually amount to a $25 million project offering a companion website, educational curricula, and the most detailed deconstruction of some of classical music’s most beloved and bedeviled works.

Recently, independent producers and co-directors David Kennard and Joan Saffa were headquartered at Newtown’s Dana-Holcombe House, while they and their long-time technical collaborators and Mr Tillson-Thomas himself scurried about Connecticut filming clips for the first of Keeping Score’s next trilogy of installments, this one dedicated to Charles Ives and his “Holidays Symphony.”

“Besides providing rather riveting, contemporary content, Keeping Score is a ten-year, $25 million project to help train teachers on not only some of the world’s most cherished pieces of classical music, but on the lives and influences surrounding their composers as they were creating these works of art,” Mr Kennard said recently after a lengthy day of filming at the Ives estate.

The location was one that was particularly striking to Ms Saffa.

“This was the room where Charles Ives essentially spent the second 40 years of his life,” Ms Saffa said, beaming with excitement. “And it had barely been touched since he died in 1954. It was like Pompeii, frozen in ash.”

She took note of tacks on a bulletin board suspending notes that Mr Ives had pinned up, and a dusty instrument that the composer used to polish or reinterpret his works.

“Michael Tilson Thomas was actually allowed to sit in Ives’ chair and play his piano,” Ms Saffa marveled.

While it may have been some of the physical trappings that caught Ms Saffa’s eye, it was clearly Ives’ dual lives that inspired Mr Kennard.

“I don’t think 99 percent of people have any idea. These composers on Keeping Score are some of the coolest, strangest people,” Mr Kennard commented. He described a young “Dasher” Ives, a proud Yalie who penned the Yale-Princeton Football anthem that is still sung at games today.

This musical genius, who pieced together musical scores like he was building a Rubik’s Cube, soon became the envy of his contemporaries.

“Aaron Copeland and Len Bernstein both agreed that Charles Ives composed some of the best symphonic scores of the early 20th Century,” Mr Kennard said. “And later in his life, when he was finally enjoying broader acclaim, it was Ives who won and refused a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.”

“Yes, he actually wrote something like ‘Prizes are for the mediocre’ on the front of the invitation to the Pulitzer ceremony and promptly sent it back unopened,” Ms Saffa added.

Charles Ives, who shared his life for more than 40 years with his devoted wife, Harmony, never really needed the tributes and royalties from his music according to Mr Kennard. In 1907 Ives, along with Julian W. Myrick, formed the insurance agency Ives & Co., which later became Ives & Myrick.

“Ironically, his composing was done in his spare time,” Ms Saffa said.

“Yes, while everyone else was deep into their crossword puzzles traveling on the train from Danbury to Manhattan, Charles was scribbling down music scores that he would use as bookmarks,” Mr Kennard said.

“More than one of these napkin drafts of his more famous compositions were discovered by his business partner as he was shuffling through ledgers years later,” Ms Saffa said.

“Here’s the man who spent his 20s and 30s establishing the most successful Metropolitan Insurance Agency in the company’s history; who invented and perfected scripted door-to-door insurance sales methods; who wrote The Insurance Salesman’s Handbook, which became the official industry text for decades, who then basically retired to his home in Redding and never looked back,” Mr Kennard continued.

Prior to their work on Keeping Score, the team of Saffa and Kennard, collectively known as Inca Productions, fashioned themselves as architects who could fashion almost any subject into an entertaining piece of film or television.

“We’ve been on-again, off-again collaborators for years,” Mr Kennard said. “People would come to us with their pet projects and we would make a film for them – it could be about cheese or pre-stressed concrete, science or art history,” he said. “We even did a piece on organic fish farming.”

“At that point in our respective careers we had more of a luxury of picking and choosing,” Ms Saffa said.

“Joan and myself, and our terribly talented crew, always had a healthy respect for music but we never imagine we’d make such a mark with this series,” Mr Kennard said. “We didn’t go to music school, so in terms of this project we’re not translators, we are interpreters.”

Ms Saffa explained that each subject’s musical invention is overlaid by narrative that delves into the biographic as well as the psyche of its creator.

“I mean these men lived in times where there was no Facebook, no MySpace,” she added.

Ms Saffa and Mr Kennard both claim to come from a documentary culture, with “an amazing dedication to quality films.” In addition to documentaries on the lives and times of Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland, complete performances of the Eroica Symphony, The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and Appalachian Spring are telecast in stunning high-definition on their PBS series.

“We believe these composers are not boring, and like any complicated subject, they can actually be presented in a way that is tremendously interesting,” Mr Kennard said. “We try to hook the viewer right away, not only examining how the particular piece of music works mechanically, but how each composer was caught up in the psychodrama of his life and the environment he was living in at the moment of his creation.”

Mr Cannard describes his subjects as the most heroic, challenging and challenged people.

“We come at the Keeping Score project looking at conductors in a unique way,” he concluded, “whether they were doing what they were doing in spite of what was going on around them, or because of it.”