By Kevin Coughlin
Stop. Look. Listen.
Nowadays, people only do that at railroad crossings — maybe.
But that doesn’t deter George Marriner Maull, the ebullient maestro and founder of the Discovery Orchestra.
In a world that bombards us with electronic noise and digital distractions, he has made it his sacred mission to teach people the lost art of “attentive listening” to classical music.
That means silencing iTunes, banishing pesky thoughts, and even putting down your program for a few minutes. Just long enough to absorb a movement of Beethoven or Brahms.
Or — on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016 — Mendelssohn.
Maestro Maull kicks off Discovery’s 30th season at 3 pm, at Drew University in Madison.
The American String Quartet and the Aeolus Quartet will help him decode Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, composed by the “Teenaged Wonder” at the ripe old age of 16.
“When I was 16, I was trying to figure out who I was!” said Maull, a Juilliard-trained conductor whose educational series on public television have garnered three Emmy nominations.
A musical career appeared to be preordained for Maull, the former director of the Louisville Ballet and New Jersey Youth Symphony and a guest conductor of the New Jersey Symphony.
His mother, a church organist who taught piano and played ukulele, sent him to a boys choir school near their Philadelphia home for his formative years.
She actually dreamed of her son becoming an Episcopal minister. Instead, he preaches the gospel according to Amadeus, Johann, Pyotr and Ludwig.
Maull’s transformation from violist and conductor to classical evangelist began early in his tenure as artistic director of the Discovery Orchestra, back when it was known as the Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey.
“People would call our office and say, ‘You know, my wife’s been dragging me to concerts for the last 20 years, and I’m bored to tears. I just don’t get it. Is there anything I could do to help myself?'”
So, in the early 1990s, Maull offered a course on how to listen to music. It ran for eight successive Monday nights at the United Methodist Church of Summit.
Only a dozen or so people showed up for the first session. But the idea morphed into more classes and concerts, from school auditoriums to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Maull has deconstructed famous pieces such as Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
TV episodes and DVDs followed in 2002, and continued this spring with the series Fall In Love With Music; the maestro estimates these shows have been viewed more than a million times.
Bach to the Future We Go! at Drew last year was peppered with explanations of ritornellos, fugatos and strettos.
If that sounds like an eat-your-spinach exercise, guess again.
PREPARE TO BE DEVASTATED
Maull bounds across the stage like a sailor on shore leave. Classical music hooked him as a pre-schooler, when his mother put the New World Symphony on the family turntable.
At 69, he still barely contains his excitement. If his enthusiasm were any more infectious, the Centers for Disease Control would place him under quarantine.
“This music moves me so much, this music has given me such intense pleasure since I was 4 ½, that I wish I could share it with other people,” he said last week, during an animated interview at a coffee shop near his home in Bedminster.
“The idea that 90 or 95 percent of the U.S. population seldom or never spend 15 minutes of undivided attention being moved to tears, having their socks knocked off by a movement of a Beethoven symphony –this is sad to me,” said Maull, as classic rock blared through the Starbucks sound system.
“The music speaks for itself. It’s fascinating to me that someone could create wordless communication… There are keys to breaking the code here. One of course, is to actually pay attention.”–Maestro George Marriner Maull
At Lincoln High School, where a teacher detected a glimmer of promise in a juvenile delinquent named Sylvester Stallone, the teenaged Maull made a surprising discovery, too.
Songs sung by Elvis and the Everly Brothers were entertaining, but he found special meaning in music without words.
Classical composers had a language all their own, expressing the inexpressible and inspiring what psychologist Abraham Maslow later would describe as “peak experiences” — transcendent moments of rapture in which anything feels possible.
“You may find that some of the deepest feelings that you have, that have never been able to be put in words, have just been expressed for you. Which might cause you to cry, or which might cause you to get goosebumps on your legs, or down your neck, or which might make you feel like you have just been transformed in some way you never even imagined,” Maull said.
One of his mentors, teacher and composer Saul Feinberg, conveyed this magic in a mandatory course for students who weren’t playing in school ensembles.
Maull performed in assorted groups at Lincoln High, but soon realized that listening to classical music required a different focus than playing an instrument.
Auditing Feinberg’s class during his lunch period, Maull marveled at how the teacher mixed discipline and whimsy to challenge teens. Most were blasé at the start of the year…and fans at the finish, he said.
Maull has endeavored to pay it forward ever since. As public schools slash art and music programs, he is contemplating musical storybooks and game apps for young children.
Learning to discern motifs and subtle variations and the interplay of strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion can enhance enjoyment of all sorts of music, he contends.
“The longer you pay attention, you just keep noticing more and more things,” Maull said.
All those details are no accident.
“They are designed to create emotional reactions, and so the real point of it all is to get the most emotional meaning out….
“Bach or Brahms or someone like that can change one chord in a very short period of time, and it has a totally, emotionally devastating effect on people who notice it.”
MORE ABOUT THE DISCOVERY ORCHESTRA
