Title: Isabel Hagen - likes a good viola joke

Isabel Hagen: It feels like one of those pieces that I don't need to hear ever again, but that's my hot take.

Manny Ax: From WQXR and Carnegie Hall, this is Classical Music Happy Hour, hosted by me, pianist, Manny Ax. Each episode, we'll speak with a special guest about their lives, listen to some of their favorite musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from you, our listeners. Isabel Hagen is a woman of many talents. A Juilliard-trained violist, her career took a bit of a left turn when she discovered comedy. She has appeared twice on The Tonight Show, starring Jimmy Fallon, and was a new face of comedy at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. These days, she also moonlights as the writer, director, and star of a film called On A String. Isabel, welcome to the show.

Isabel Hagen: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Manny Ax: No, it's great. It's a pleasure to meet a fellow Juilliard graduate.

Isabel Hagen: I'm finally getting to meet a fellow Juilliard graduate myself.

Manny Ax: Did you have a good time at Juilliard?

Isabel Hagen: I did.

Manny Ax: You enjoyed it?

Isabel Hagen: I think people sometimes assume I'm on some sort of crusade because I gave up music to pursue standup comedy, but I really loved my time at Juilliard, and my issue with music is only a battle with myself and my own performance anxiety demons. I had a lot of great friends, really good experiences. It was a second home for me.

Manny Ax: Why did you decide to go into music at all?

Isabel Hagen: I came from a musical family. My dad is a jazz sax player, and my older brother is a classical pianist and conductor. My mother's musical, though not professional, but very musical family. It was just sort of--

Manny Ax: Natural thing to do.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. I started on piano when I was four, but really didn't take to it.

Manny Ax: Wow.

Isabel Hagen: Then I begged my dad to get me violin lessons, and then switched to viola at age 10, because my brother had a friend who played the viola, who I thought was cool. I had a bit of a crush on him.

Manny Ax: You liked the larger instruments?

Isabel Hagen: Yes, yes, the deeper tone.

Manny Ax: Well, why not?

Isabel Hagen: I fell in love with it, and that's all I wanted to do.

Manny Ax: No, that's fantastic. Then somehow you went into comedy. Now, I will say that I know a lot of musicians who try to be funny. We don't succeed very often, but it's amazing to meet someone who's actually succeeding at this very difficult craft.

Isabel Hagen: Well, yes. I often say now I have a new appreciation for the music career, because it took pursuing the one career more miserable than music to really appreciate.

Manny Ax: It must be even harder, huh?

Isabel Hagen: In a way. I think it's harder, but I'm more suited for the specific difficulties of it, because with music, sure, they applaud no matter what, whereas--

Manny Ax: What a blessing.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. Really, you've got to appreciate that. Whereas comedy, you're looking for a specific reaction throughout the performance, and if you don't get it, as Seinfeld said, it ceases to be the art form if it's not working. Because people aren't laughing, it ceases to be comedy. The same time, there's a lot more freedom for me. I don't have to worry about my finger moving in a weird way, and the whole thing going south. I can be my nervous self and not worry about having to relax my body, and all these things that plagued me when I was just a violist.

Manny Ax: I would have thought it's actually more nerve-racking to come up with what to say when.

Isabel Hagen: The thing is, so much of standup, at least for me, is planned. I'm doing jokes that I've already written, that I've already tweaked. Sure, someone might heckle me, and I come up with something in the moment, but a lot of it is very much planned and practiced, just like you practice your instrument.

[music]

Manny Ax: I'm hoping that you can help me answer some questions about classical music from our listeners. We've invited them to submit their questions, and we're going to do our best to answer them. If I don't know the answer, I'll just make something up.

Isabel Hagen: Yes.

Manny Ax: Here's the first one. A listener wants to know about orchestras.

Female Speaker: I'm curious about how orchestra musicians are seated and why there seems to be a set seating pattern, although other times I see it, it varies. Does it vary according to the acoustics in a particular hall, or does it vary according to what the conductor likes? Just a curious question that I've had for a long time. Thank you.

Manny Ax: Great. Well, I think we both probably have several answers.

Isabel Hagen: Oh, yes.

Manny Ax: First of all, everything you said is correct, because sometimes it's the piece of music, and there are certain requirements. If you have a piece, which I was involved in once, for three percussion players, three clarinets, and a brass section, you're obviously going to seat things differently from having strings, woodwinds, and so forth. That's one thing. You've played in orchestras, of course, all your life. Have you found this idea of seating, for example, first violins one side, second violins other side? Then sometimes it's first violins, second violins next to them. What's your take on all of that?

Isabel Hagen: Yes. Well, as a violist, sometimes the viola section is on the outside. Sometimes they're on the inside. That's the most common variation I noticed. That was always conductor preference from my observation. I always thought that the violins on either side was more of a European tradition, but I might be making that up.

Manny Ax: I think it used to be that way. I think maybe people found that it was better for ensemble. I wondered if it has to do with who has to dress better, because if you're seated on the outside, you have to look fairly decent. Actually, to be serious about the answer, I think the tradition has grown up because people have found that the particular way of seating strings in the front, woodwinds behind, brass behind them, percussion behind them, is usually the best sounding for most traditional music.

Isabel Hagen: Right.

Manny Ax: That's where you switch back and forth. One great example of what's possible in a given hall is in Vienna, where the hall is not so big, and the stage is particularly small, the basses all go in a row at the very back of the orchestra. They don't sit in a section, to one side. They very often sit in one row because that tends to work there. The chairs are also very funny because the back of the orchestra is on steps. Some of the chairs have front legs that are normal and back legs which are very, very short, so they go onto the riser. Depends on the hall.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. Certain pieces have, but very few have actual prescriptive seating, mostly modern, more 20th-century pieces.

Manny Ax: Yes. All I know is, when I play the piano, I have to be seated in front of the keyboard. The rest of it works fine for me. Have we bored our poor listener enough?

Isabel Hagen: [laughs]

[music]

Manny Ax: Did you start with musical jokes?

Isabel Hagen: No. I did talk a little in my recital and made some musical jokes within that. I did an all Hindemith recital, because I thought that would be kind of funny.

Manny Ax: That is kind of, yes, in a way. It could be the punchline to a very good musical joke.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. I played Trower music, which was written for the death of King George V in like six hours. I made a little joke about, "This piece was written in six hours. You decide if you can tell it was written that quickly or not."

Manny Ax: Well, at least it's good he waited for the guy to die to write it. That's always nice.

Isabel Hagen: Exactly. When I did just stand up, actually, I tried to keep them very separate. I didn't let on that I was a musician or anything. I was just trying to be a comedian.

Manny Ax: One of the reasons I ask is because there is a whole subgenre of musical jokes, which are viola jokes, infinite examples.

Isabel Hagen: Oh, yes.

Manny Ax: I'm sure you know them all.

Isabel Hagen: As soon as I switched to viola when I was 10, I immediately googled viola jokes and just memorized a bunch of them.

Manny Ax: I think, actually, the first viola joke was Berlioz. I think somewhere in either the memoirs or his book of criticisms. Of course, what used to happen was that violists were violinists who then became violists. He says somewhere, something about the Paris opera orchestra, he saw such and such, and he said, "Oh, so young and already a violist." I think that may have been the first one ever.

Isabel Hagen: I was going to say, can we trace the origin of viola?

Manny Ax: I thought maybe. I seem to remember reading that somewhere, but I could be completely wrong.

Isabel Hagen: All right. There's also Harold in Italy. [music] Is that just one big viola joke or?

Manny Ax: Well, no. It's a beautiful piece.

Isabel Hagen: That's Berlioz, right? I'm not having a--

Manny Ax: It's Berlioz. Yes. No, it's definitely Berlioz. I guess if there is a joke in that, is that, in the first movement, there's a lot for viola, and then it gets less and less as it goes on, but I don't know for sure. Anyway, I'm full of misinformation about many things, and this is probably one of the things. [music] I saw some clips of you, and being an old guy, I still remember Henny Youngman. He used the same pattern that you use sometimes. You play a little bit, and then you tell a joke.

Isabel Hagen: I do comedy, I play viola. A lot of people have asked me, "Oh, you do both. Do you ever do like a viola comedy show?" and I usually say no, because who would want to see that? [laughter] Enough people asked, then I decided to sort of humor them. If you don't mind, I'm going to experiment, and I'm going to play a little viola and then do a little stand-up, and we'll see how it kind of goes together. All right?

[laughter] [applause] [music]

I hate when people show me pictures of their kids. [laughter] It's like, "We get it. He's missing. Move on."

[laughter] [music]

My friend recently told me I have resting, sad face. [laughter] I was like, "Oh, no, it's active." [laughter] "Help."

[laughter] [music]

Manny Ax: Henny Youngman did the same thing with the violin. Was he kind of something that-- I won't say inspired you, but--

Isabel Hagen: No one will believe me, but the way I came up with what I do is I wanted to combine the two things, after four years of keeping them separate. I didn't want to diminish the quality of either one, so finally I thought, "Well, what if I just play beautiful music and then tell a really funny joke next to each other, and then the juxtaposition of how ridiculous that is will be the humor?" That's what happened, and then someone said, "Well, Henny Youngman," who I knew as someone who had a violin but never really watched him--

Manny Ax: You came to it later?

Isabel Hagen: I saw it, and I said, "Oh, my gosh. That's what I do." It felt really nice to see it, but I actually wasn't inspired by him originally. No one will believe me, so--

Manny Ax: That's fine. I believe you implicitly.

Isabel Hagen: Thank you.

Manny Ax: Completely. You were going to talk about the Brahms F major String Quintet.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. I think Brahms's string writing often gets criticized for being, I don't know, a little inefficient or a little awkward. I've always loved both viola quintets, but I feel like the other one is played more, the one that's in G major. I never hear people perform the F major.

Manny Ax: I'm ashamed to say that I don't know it.

Isabel Hagen: I expected you not to. No one ever plays it, but I had a CD as a kid with both of them on it, and I listened to both of them. Every movement is so beautiful. [music] It just reminds me of the joy of chamber music camp and everyone just coming together for a simple goal of enjoying music. [music] I remember saying to a teacher that I enjoyed the string writing of Brahms, and he responded that he was a little worried about my intellectual inquiry for liking-- [chuckles]

Manny Ax: Does that mean asking a question?

Isabel Hagen: Just that I didn't want to delve in to see the problems of Brahms's stringwriting.

Manny Ax: I find it interesting that people are able to say that about a composer like Brahms. For example, from my side, I've heard people say that Beethoven is unpianistic, which-- I feel that it's kind of a meaningless statement, because if anybody defined the piano, it was Beethoven. To say that his music is unpianistic doesn't really mean very much. It's for you to figure out how to make it sound good, and people do. The same is true, I would say, for Brahms's string writing, added to which he probably had one of the great string teachers of the entire century working with him hand in glove, Joseph Joachim, who was probably the great violinist after Paganini, renowned all over Europe.

Brahms was constantly writing to him, "Is this practical? Does this work? Should I do this? How do I double-stop this?"

Isabel Hagen: Was Joachim the one who helped him with the clarinet sonata transcriptions, or was that--

Manny Ax: I'm sure. I'm sure. They were very close friends, in spite of a couple of periods of falling out. The double concerto for violoncello was like a make-up gift to Joachim. I think there's no issue with the writing. I think it's okay.

Isabel Hagen: Maybe it was more a criticism of his string chamber music, his quartets, and his-- maybe it was that specific, but it was just something I sort of grew up hearing and never really agreed with. I think people like to find things to criticize, but why Brahms?

Manny Ax: Yes, why Brahms? My God, we could do it to a lot of other people, like Beethoven and Mozart. Those guys can take it.

Isabel Hagen: Yes, they're fine.

[music]

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax, and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. We'll return in just a moment. I'm Manny Ax. Here's a little more from Isabel Hagen. This is Classical Music Happy Hour. What is your go-to beverage after a long day?

Isabel Hagen: Either a white wine or a tea, depending on the day.

Manny Ax: Wow. Not so adventurous. Okay.

Isabel Hagen: Yes.

Manny Ax: What is the first concert you ever went to?

Isabel Hagen: I'm trying to remember. My father's a musician. The earliest memory, he played this revival of this show called The Gospel at Colonus, and it was at Carnegie Hall. It was a sort of concert version of this Broadway show he played. That's my earliest memory of going to a concert, besides my brother's piano recitals. I have an older brother.

Manny Ax: You would have been very young.

Isabel Hagen: Very young.

Manny Ax: Very young. Okay. What's your favorite musical hot take?

Isabel Hagen: I guess there's been this push to let people clap between movements.

Manny Ax: Do you not like that?

Isabel Hagen: No, I like that.

Manny Ax: I love it.

Isabel Hagen: I think let people enjoy the music and express it.

Manny Ax: Absolutely, and I think, above all, it's authentic.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. In Mozart's time, they were whooping and hollering during the recap.

Manny Ax: Without question. If there were no applause at the end of the first movement of the fifth symphony of Beethoven, Beethoven would have been devastated.

Isabel Hagen: Right.

Manny Ax: It would have been horrible. We have to go back to that.

Isabel Hagen: Yes.

Manny Ax: Obviously, musical performers, most of the time, they come out and they play set music. It's already written, they know what's going to be played. We don't need to feel out the people we're playing for on a second-to-second basis, whereas I imagine that if you're doing a standup show, you get an instantaneous feel for, "Are they going to laugh at this? Are they going to laugh at all?" and you have to adjust all of that immediately.

Isabel Hagen: Yes.

Manny Ax: That's the part I think would be incredibly difficult.

Isabel Hagen: It's kind of a macro version of adjusting for intonation, because I heard someone say intonation is mostly just adjusting, but it's these tiny intangible amounts of time.

Manny Ax: I understand, because there's no such thing as "This is the correct intonation. This is incorrect." Depends on what's around you.

Isabel Hagen: Right, and the same with audiences for comedy. Immediately, I get a sense, "Oh, they're not liking this," or "They need this kind of thing." There's only so much I can do to adjust. I'm not going to become someone else on stage.

Manny Ax: One of the reasons that all of this fascinates me endlessly is because I think we're now entering a period where musicians like me that are essentially boring piano players, also do a little bit of speaking to the audience about pieces that may not be quite as familiar, and so I have to figure out what works with whom and even try to be funny when it's useful.

Isabel Hagen: I think it's so great to talk when you're playing classical music. I just find the audience just sort of sighs, really, like, "Oh, okay, we're all here together." Do you find it has a disarming effect?

Manny Ax: I find it has a disarming effect both on the audience and on me. I am a lot less nervous once I finish doing that. On the other hand, they're not expecting me to be brilliant at speaking. If I stumble, if my joke doesn't work, there's always Beethoven to fall back on, which is very helpful. Is that the way you started going into comedy, by having a chance to play and do some speaking?

Isabel Hagen: In a way. I also went to a couple open mics just on my own, without my instrument as well. I was studying music in New York, and there are so many places to go do comedy and try it.

Manny Ax: You mean you can actually go to a club or place, or something?

Isabel Hagen: Yes, there's a website that had all the open mics listed, and I just picked one, and I went. The New York City open mics are not always wonderful. In fact, they're often the opposite of wonderful, and it's a good weeding-out situation.

Manny Ax: You've talked about performance anxiety, both sides, comedy and music. Do you find that one helps the other?

Isabel Hagen: Absolutely. Comedy really helps. Just the sheer amount you get on stage as a comedian. I'm taking the stage sometimes three times a night for different spots, so it's just that flexing the muscle of performing, which-- I never went on to have a big performance career after Juilliard as a soloist, but at school, you don't get that many performance opportunities, so I wasn't flexing that muscle. Now it's just-- performances have become less precious. They have great importance, but I'm less, "Oh, this better be-- this is it."

Manny Ax: Do you play full-length pieces?

Isabel Hagen: Sometimes in my act, I'll play a full movement of a box suite, and then I occasionally still play regular gigs with a quartet or a group, so then in that situation I do.

Manny Ax: When you do that, do they let you introduce things?

Isabel Hagen: They try. I don't like doing it.

Manny Ax: I see.

Isabel Hagen: Sometimes people think my comedy is like a good idea when I know it wouldn't be, so I tend to be a little cagey about combining them sometimes.

Manny Ax: It depends on the situation?

Isabel Hagen: Yes, absolutely.

Manny Ax: Okay. [music] When you come out, you're always looking at who's out there. To what degree does that affect you, and do you tend to focus on one friendly face, or is it a wash of people?

Isabel Hagen: I was just dealing with this because I played in a theater that's a little bigger than I'm used to playing, and so you have a little more variety of people to focus on. There was someone right in the front who didn't look like they were enjoying it at all, and then a bunch of people behind them who were having the time of their life. I couldn't not look at this one person in the front. I was like, "If they're having a bad time, then all is lost."

Manny Ax: You wanted to grab that person?

Isabel Hagen: Yes. Even though the common advice is to focus on the people enjoying it, because people will try to join their bandwagon rather than the one person scowling or-- I try to keep it a general thing and focus on my energy out broadly, but sometimes I get distracted.

Manny Ax: I ask because I'm in the lucky position of just looking across the piano and not really noticing that people are yawning or whatever's going on. Now that I'm getting older, I can't even hear the coughing and rustling, and phones, so everything is fine.

Isabel Hagen: Well, when I was just a violist and playing long recitals, if I ever looked out at the audience during the performance, it felt like such a faux pas and also would really screw me up. "Don't look. Don't look."

Manny Ax: That's another interesting thing. We don't tend to look at audiences when we play, do we?

Isabel Hagen: No.

Manny Ax: If somebody does Lang Lang, for example, sometimes we'll look at the audience and people are so shocked by this when they see, "My God, he looks at people. Maybe it's fine."

Isabel Hagen: Right. In all other music genres, it's normal. I guess you could compare it to ballet. Ballerinas don't tend to look at the audience, I guess.

Manny Ax: I don't know why. They have nothing to do except move their feet.

Isabel Hagen: Right, and they twirl. They have so many opportunities.

Manny Ax: Yes, exactly. [music] Here we have a question from New York.

Steve: Hi, my name is Steve, and I live in New York City. I would like to know the difference between atonal and dissonant. It has been explained to me before, but as a layman who does not play an instrument or read music, I never quite got it and would be grateful for any further explanation. Thank you.

Manny Ax: Well, I'll have a go at it. I think it's more a matter of definition of words than a definition of sounds. The reason I say that is because dissonance actually just means not in harmony with. That can be true of language, a relationship, and certainly music. A Beethoven symphony, a Mozart piece, any traditional music contains an enormous amount of dissonance. Basically, most of music is going from dissonance to consonance, so the very idea that in the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, for example, which we all-- ta, ta, ta, ta-- [music] and then it winds up on this, bum, pum, puh. That chord is not dissonant in itself, but it requires some kind of closure. I think that's really the point, dissonance to consonants. That's true of basically all classical music.

Now, atonal would be music that has no center, such as C major, G minor, but it's not what you call it, it's what you hear. If you hear something that resolves into a sound where you say, "Oh, yes, this is the end. This is the end of the Star-Spangled Banner," [music] is, let's say, a C major chord, that sounds to you like a consonant chord. Am I making sense with this?

Isabel Hagen: Yes, you actually made me realize what it is.

Manny Ax: Atonality would be, let's say, you are going, "O say--" [music] and you stop on "the", probably that's more of an atonality because there's a weird note in that chord. There's a D in an A minor chord.

Isabel Hagen: Right, or atonal music. It's dissonant without the resolution. Dissonance is just the quality of the clashing. All atonal music is dissonant, but not all dissonant music is atonal. Does that make sense?

Manny Ax: That sounds logical to me, even though I didn't quite follow it. That sounds perfect. I think to most of us, when you say atonal music, it means stuff that sounds not harmonious. I think that's probably the best answer I can come up with off the cuff.

Isabel Hagen: Well, I thought it was a very good answer and made a lot of sense to me.

Manny Ax: Okay. Well, what do you know?

Isabel Hagen: Yes, it's true. Don't take my word for it.

[laughter] [music]

Manny Ax: I want to ask you about some of your substack things. First of all, I was absolutely struck and very much in agreement with the idea of we don't need to save classical music. Sometimes we do emphasize the glass-is-half-empty aspect, and I just wondered, do you mind older audiences?

Isabel Hagen: Not at all. I have a lot of older audiences come to see me do standup because they're intrigued by the viola, and sometimes they're the best crowds.

Manny Ax: I think that's one of the things people talk about a lot, about the idea that audiences are older--

Isabel Hagen: And, "How can we get the young people to the-- Maybe if we offer them beer."

Manny Ax: I guess we're all living so much longer, and we seem to have more time toward the end of our lives than we did at the beginning.

Isabel Hagen: Right.

Manny Ax: Now, the other substack thing that struck me very forcibly was your opinion on concertos. You seem to have a pet peeve of the Tchaikovsky Rococo variations.

Isabel Hagen: Yes. There are many concertos that are beautiful pieces, and of course, I want to hear the soloists that play them. It's a bit of a joke, but it was inspired by having the radio wake me up in the morning, it was the Rococo variations, and I just couldn't.

Manny Ax: You say, "Wake me up in the morning," sounds like Groundhog Day. You had it every day.

Isabel Hagen: Another no. My husband has a clock radio that wakes us up, and I guess one morning it was Rococo. I had played the piece before, numerous times in different youth orchestras.

Manny Ax: It intrigues me that you focused on that, because I think it's a very beautiful piece. I'm sorry to say.

Isabel Hagen: There's something about the melody. It's kind of dinky to me, and it's just a little too long. It feels like one of those pieces that I don't need to hear ever again. That's my hot take.

Manny Ax: Okay. All right, but you don't generalize. I just wondered if the Brahms B flat Piano Concerto was a goner for you.

Isabel Hagen: Which one is that?

Manny Ax: It's the one that's not in D minor.

Isabel Hagen: Okay.

Manny Ax: It's the one in B flat.

Isabel Hagen: Great. Got it.

Manny Ax: It's the one with four movements.

Isabel Hagen: Okay. The one where the pianist is the soloist.

Manny Ax: That's the one. That's exactly the one.

Isabel Hagen: I do love the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.

Manny Ax: Oh, that's nice. It's very difficult to choose these things when you're in love with an instrument.

Isabel Hagen: It is, and I think a lot of our opinions about most pieces are more contextual than we'd like to admit. "Where were you in your life when you first discovered this piece? Were you in love? Were you heartbroken? What was going on?"

Manny Ax: Yes, and probably true. When you're a listener at a concert, your reaction to any performance is probably just as much informed by your feeling at the time as by the quality of the performance.

Isabel Hagen: Right. "Were you hungry? Did you eat enough that day?"

Manny Ax: Exactly. For me, that's never a problem. [music] Isabel Hagen, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure.

Isabel Hagen: Thank you so much for having me.

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax, and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. Classical Music Happy Hour is supported in part by the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation and by Linda Nelson. Our production team includes Lauren Purcell-Joiner, Eileen Delahunty, Laura Boyman, Elizabeth Nonamaker, David Norville, Christine Herskovits, and Ed Yim. Our engineering team includes George Wellington, Irene Trudel, and Chase Culpon. Classical Music Happy Hour is produced by WQXR in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

[music]

 

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