Tamara Volskaya Plays Mozart's Rondo alla Turca

What a thrill it is to hear Tamara Volskaya (and the rest of the Abaca String Band) play this piece!



Before today I only knew her as a brilliant woman of mystery from somewhere in Russia, in black and white. Now, a generation later and in full color (I think it's appropriate that she wears red), she continues to be a real inspiration. Here are some more treats:

Der Fluyten Lust (and amore) hof

In 1980 I came across a reprint of a volume of Jacob van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-hof in the Joseph Patelson Music House in New York. I was preparing to leave town (and country) with my modern flute and piccolo, and had really no idea where I was going after the six weeks I was planning to spend in an orchestra in Graz, Austria and an international flute competition I was attending in Budapest. I had only recently been introduced to the idea of jazz improvisation, and I thought that this little book might be a good way to learn to improvise in an idiom other than the Jazz idiom (which seemed terribly complicated to me at the time). I had no idea that there was a centuries-long tradition of "dividing" popular melodies, so I though that this book, which was actually something quite old, was something quite new.

(You would think that a Juilliard graduate would know something about music history, but this was not the case for me.)

Wouldn't you know it. I got a teaching position in a music school in the little town of Schladming, Austria where a large part of my job was to teach recorder. I hadn't played recorder since I was five or six, so I had to start from scratch with the little soprano Moeck that I found in the drawer of the desk in my studio. I spent the week before the beginning of the school year going through Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and I fell in love with the instrument and the music.

These are five of my favorite melodies from the collection. When I first got my viola d'amore, I tried these pieces out on the instrument. The divisions (all the melodies are divided) are rough, but the melodies are as rewarding to play on the viola d'amore as they are on the recorder.

Here's a link to a PDF of the above piece, and here's a link to the original set of publications from 1644-1656.

The Rite of Spring 100 Years Later: The Ultimate Sacrifice

In some ways I wish I didn't enjoy this animation of the Rite of Spring by Stephen Malinowski so much. The music is all synthetically generated using sounds from the Vienna Symphonic Library. All the rhythms, dynamics, and pitches are almost perfect (in the comments an astute trombone player noted a mistake). There is even a believable violin glissando. There are only a few places where the lack of human imperfection sabotages the excitement (particularly eight minutes into the second part, where all of a sudden everything sounds robotic). The animation, however, is remarkable. Watching the video is a fine lesson in orchestration.

Here's Part 1



and here's Part 2



Stephen Malinowski can't do his animations without getting permission for the recordings he uses. Permission costs money. Technological tools (which are expensive) cost less money than licenses. Making excellent electronic scores takes a large amount of skill, but it is a different kind of skill set from the skill set that most real-time (as in 20 or 30 years of experience) musicians have. What used to be considered a helpful tool for composers has become a viable option for replacing professional musicians in all sorts of ways. I can't really see any greater good coming from all this.

Sometimes I fear that the way things are going, we might be looking at a plausible future of large-scale orchestral music. I find this sad. Terribly, terribly sad.

Martin Perry Plays Ives and Binkerd: Ramble After a Recording

There is really no way that I can write an unbiased review of Martin Perry's brand new recording on Bridge of the Charles Ives "Concord" Sonata and three of Gordon Binkerd's Essays for the Piano (the first recordings of these pieces), so I will let my biases fly and ramble.



The Ives "Concord" Sonata is a work of time and place for me. I spent a good part of my last year in high school listening to John Kirkpatrick's recording, and reading Essays Before A Sonata. It was at Martin Perry's apartment in New York in the early 1980s (he now lives in Maine) that I first met a live person who actually played the "Concord" Sonata (it was Stephen Drury). It was also in Marty's apartment that I first read Proust and made the immediate connection with the Saint-Saens D minor Violin Sonata, a piece that I played with Marty back in my days as a flutist who really wished she were a violinist (and I'm living proof that wishes like that can come true).

I was thrilled to hear that Marty made a recording of the piece on the excellent Bridge label, and I just finished listening to it.

The Ives is music of place for me (since I grew up outside of Boston, and had significant events happen at Walden Pond), and it turns out that the Binkerd is also music of place. Gordon Binkerd (1916-2003) spent his career teaching composition at the University of Illinois (50 miles up the road from me), and these three piano pieces sparkle with the prairie landscape that I have grown to love. Marty has never been to this part of the country, but he does a really good job of picking up Binkerd's clues and making it aurally recognizable. The connection to the Ives "Concord" Sonata is unmistakable.

Drew Massey's notes mention that Binkerd's Essays were published in 1976. That happened to be the year I spent obsessed with Ives. Who knew that I would meet Martin Perry at Juilliard the following year, and who knew that I would move to Binkerd's Illinois in 1985? Binkerd retired from teaching in 1971, but he stuck around here for the rest of his life. I could have seen him in the grocery store, in the library, or even at a concert.

All these highly personal coincidences are wrapped up in this remarkable recording.

I said earlier that I cannot be unbiased, so it is with a great deal of bias that I tell you that this is extremely thoughtful and extremely beautiful playing. Marty is a person of serious musical intelligence, and he uses it to bring out all the cyclic material in the "Concord" Sonata in a way that provides a strong structure for the piece. All the musical thoughts have their places. He allows for great amounts of exuberance in the exuberant parts, and extraordinarily touching introspection in the introspective parts. Listening is a rather cathartic experience, and an experience that helps put some of the craziness of the world into perspective for me, if only by presenting a world of pure feeling, pure sound, and a bunch of nostalgia in such a clean and fresh package.

44 Bartok Violin Duos played by Sándor Végh and Alberto Lysy (1974)

There is French narration for about a minute and a half into the first segment, but then it's just pure Bartok.

Part one



Part two



Part three



Part four



Part five



Part six

Interview Informercial

Last night I heard an interview show on the radio that featured some of the members of Brooklyn Rider. The point of the show was to introduce this particular string quartet as a group of musicians who are saving classical music because they are making it appealing to young people. The host was gushing away about how much he loved the way they were revitalizing music, and how the music they played transformed him. He went on and on. The musicians went on and on also, answering telephone calls from people young and old who echoed the feelings of the interviewer. There were planted questions (or at least they sounded planted) asking about their relationships with people on college campuses, and asking them to describe the responses of the audiences they played for during their recent Asian tour.

These people do have excellent technique, and they can move around their instruments at great speeds, and with great precision. In addition to some of their modal improvisations (inspired by Mediterranean and Balkan traditional music), the host played a bit of a slow movement from Brooklyn Rider's recording of Beethoven Opus 131. It was played without vibrato, and very well in tune. The musicians played it without the usual long-lined phrasing that string quartet musicians spend a lifetime (or four) trying to deliver to audiences and to one another. It was as dull. Is the way to engage the hearts of young people to look counter cultural (dress like a hipster) and play Beethoven without trying to make long phrases and give color to the sound? Is the trick to bore them?

Then there was a bit about Bartok, and the host went on and on about how this music was so new. I love Bartok, particularly his string quartets, but his Second String Quartet (that's the one they sampled in the show) is almost 100 years old. Yes, like Haydn, Bartok will always be "new" in spirit, but it's still the new music of the Brooklyn Riders' grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Perhaps the worst part of the show was the discussion they had about Bartok's visit to Nigeria, and how it affected the rhythms in his music. Bartok did travel to Tangier in 1906 and in 1913. Tangier is in Morocco, and was a hot vacation spot during the first decades of the 20th century; but the mix of cultures there would have been totally different from anything you would find in Nigeria. Bartok would have had no reason to travel to Nigeria.

I can understand how a non-musical radio host might mix up Tangier and Nigeria, since both are on the continent of Africa; but the musicians should have known better.

I would have not written this post if one of the musicians simply said, "I think you mean Tangier."

Marxolin and Banjo

Our son Ben is playing (and beat-boxing) an improvisation with a marxolin player. What a nifty instrument!

The Tanglewood Story from 1949

The BSO musicians here I remember from my days as a young person in Boston are Alfred Krips, Rolland Tapley, George Zazofsky, Clarence Knudson, Stanley Benson, and Sheldon Rotenberg; violists Eugen Lehner, George Humphrey, and Jerome Lipson; cellist Alfred Zighera; flutist James Pappoutsakis, oboist John Homes, English horn player Louis Speyer, clarinetist Pasquale Cardillo, bassoonist Ernst Panenka, horn players James Stagliano and Harry Shapiro, trumpet player Roger Voisin, harpist Bernard Zighera, and percussionist Charles Smith.

I knew them as the elder statesmen of the orchestra. I don't recognize any of the student musicians here aside from Elayne Jones (you can see and hear her playing timpani at 8:34). That sure is some austere Bach at 12:51! I wonder what happened to that two-headed sculpture? Do you recognize anyone? Who is that composer?



Here's a link to the programs from that 68th Season (1948-1949), which I suppose was Serge Koussevitsky's last season as music director.

Doing Something to Help

This was an interesting day for me. It began with a Moyers & Company podcast interview with Sandra Steingraber about her fight with the "authorities" (a.k.a. the law) concerning the environmental dangers associated with fracking. I came home with a heightened respect for civil disobedience.

After my walk, I talked with my mother who has just come through a situation involving her legal right to have a ramp remain attached to her building. The law states firmly that if a person with a disability needs equipment to make it possible for him or her to enter his or her home, that person has a right to install it (or in my mother's case have it remain in place).

My mother said that this episode reminded her that her youth was well spent. When she was young (i.e. my age), she worked for an organization dedicated to claiming rights for people with disabilities. She went to a lot of sit-ins and engaged in a respectable amount of civil disobedience. Her activism caused laws like the one cited by her lawyer to be put in place.

We are faced with some really difficult problems in our corporately-controlled world, and if we all don't do something to fight the injustices (and in Sandra Steingraber's case, the toxins) that threaten us in more ways than we can imagine, there's no hope for the future.

I'm sharing the above link, and I'm also sharing this video from Mayors Against Illegal Guns because I can. Please share it with your friends.

The Newest Thing

Fran Lebowitz talks here (about 3 1/2 minutes into the clip) why there is so little that's new in current culture.

“There’s nothing new because the culture is soaked in nostalgia. I believe that must be caused by people my age. I mean, that cannot be caused by 17-year-olds. . . . If you’re young, everything is new to you. So if you go to an exhibit of a young artist, everybody says that this is amazing, and you look at it and you think, `This is surrealism. This is a hundred years old.’ But you have to first know that. Otherwise it seems like a new invention. But there is an endless recycling of the culture of the last thirty years that is really death-dealing. I think it’s just horrible. Really awful. That is the sort of change I would like to see. That is the job of people that are young. That’s your job. Do something new.”

I wonder about the idea of "something new" in music and art (or in "non-popular" culture). When I hear something old that I have never heard before, it is something new to me. Maybe my experience might be like the above artist for whom 100-year-old surrealism is a new medium of choice. The Picasso exhibit at the Art Institute in Chicago is loaded with all sorts of pieces by Picasso that were new to me when I saw them last month, but they were works he made a long time ago. The excitement of that "newness" is just as exciting for me as discovering new works by a young artist who is not as well known as Picasso and is currently making art. Unfortunately I tend to find that "something new" more often in works by older people or people who are no longer alive than in people who are young (though art by young children nearly always feels new and exciting to me).

"Something new" doesn't have to be presented in a totally abstract way. Something new happens every time a baby is born, every time two people fall in love, and every time that winter gives way to spring, and things begin growing. "Something new" happens every time a piece of music is played by a living breathing musician (no matter how old the piece might be, or how many times it has been played). "Something new" can happen in a piece of newly-written music that uses instruments in much the same way they were used 100 years ago. "Something new" can even be made of the same kind of harmonic material that composers used over 100 years ago.

Oscar Wilde and Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz was born on October 27, 1950, and Oscar Wilde was born October 16, 1854. They are nearly a century apart, but so close not only in spirit and wit, but in looks. Wow.

"An odd pair of second raters."

Now that I've worked my way through Brahms, I've fallen back on Bruckner again. An odd pair of second raters. The one was "in the casting ladle" too long, the other not long enough. Now I stick to Beethoven. There are only he and Richard--and after them, nobody.

[From a letter Gustav Mahler wrote to Alma Mahler possibly in 1904 (presumably in July), as found in Irving Kolodin's The Composer as Listener]

The reference to the "casting ladle" is a reference to Act five, scene four of Peer Gynt. The "Richard" Mahler refers to is, of course, Wagner, and not Strauss. So who did Mahler think was in too long, and who not long enough, and why?

"a puny little dwarf with a rather narrow chest"

I have gone all through Brahms by now. All I can say of him is that he's a puny little dwarf with a rather narrow chest. Good Lord, if a breath from the lungs of Richard Wagner whistled about his ears he would scarcely be able to keep his feet. But I don't mean to hurt his feelings. You will be astonished when I tell you where I get more completely bogged down than anywhere else--in his so-called 'developments." It is very seldom he can make anything whatever of his themes, beautiful as they often are. Only Beethoven and Wagner, after all, could that.

[from a letter written by Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler on June 23, 1904, and found in Irving Kolodin's The Composer as Listener]

Chopin Quizzes!

. . . So you think you know something about Chopin?

Try your hand at these quizzes! And then there's the Chopin-specific "name that tune."

"Are they all fools or am I a fool?"

From Clara Schumann's diary entry dated September 8, 1875

We went to Tristan und Isolde this evening. It is the most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life. To have to sit through a while evening watching, listening to such love-lunacy till every feeling of decency was outraged, and to see not only the audience but the musicians delighted with it was--I may well say--the saddest experience of my whole artistic career. I held out till the end, as I wished to have heard it all. Neither of them does anything but sleep and sing during the second act, and the while of act III--quite forty minutes--Tristan occupies in dying--and they call that dramatic!!! Levi says Wagner is a better musician than Gluck. . . Are they all fools or am I a fool? The subject seems to me so wretched: a love-madness brought about by a potion--how is it possible to take the slightest interest in the lovers? It is not emotion, it is a disease, and they tear their hearts out of their bodies, while the music expresses it all in the most repulsive manner. I could go on lamenting over it for ever, and exclaiming against it.

[from The Composer as Listener, edited (and I imagine translated) by Irving Kolodin.]

THANK YOU

This brought tears to my eyes . . .

I may have spent most of my adult life in Illinois, but I'll always be a proud Bostonian. This heartfelt singing is from tonight's game. Everyone there understands how singing together helps express the shared feelings that we otherwise cannot express.

Self Evaluation and Performance Ramble

I don't know if it is possible for any creative person to properly evaluate his or her own work. I certainly am not able to do it. I can be proud of having written something that has all the pitches and rhythms in the "right" places, and if somebody likes what I have written, I can be pleased that it gave (or gives) him or her some pleasure. Beyond that it is really not my place to say whether something I write is "good" or not. Anyway I believe that the real value comes when somebody plays what I have written, and when somebody plays a piece I have written really well, I tend to give the credit to the interpreter. The music itself can only be what it is, and it is (thankfully, when I'm not playing) not my job to determine what that might be.

Every piece of music is incomplete until it is interpreted. Every piece of music can be interpreted in many different ways. Perhaps the best measurement of the quality of a piece of music is how personally it can be interpreted and still make linear sense.

Perhaps music making and playing is a bit like sewing. It takes a lot of know-how, patience, time, material, equipment, vision, experience, and talent to sew an article of clothing. That article of clothing is meaningless if it sits on a hanger. It can only be useful when someone wears it, and because people come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, that piece of clothing will look very different on different people. People also wear different kinds of clothing for different kinds of weather and different circumstances. It is my job as a composer to make sure that the pieces I write fit the "contours" of the people who might want to play them, otherwise nobody will.

I have clothes that I'm happy to wear around the house. I wouldn't wear them when I go out to dinner or out to teach. I also have pieces of music that I play every day and would never want to perform in public. Just because I'm not practicing something for a performance doesn't mean that it isn't a fully-functioning piece of music.

Composers today seem to put such a great emphasis on "getting" performances. I like hearing people play my pieces as much as any other composer, but I would be just as happy if the music I have written ends up mostly as something that people play at home with their friends, and without an audience. Is a piece that people play for fun and personal expression less of a piece if it's not being performed for others?

A Major State of Ebb

Everything in my musical life has had its ebb and flow. My most exciting period of "flow" happened in my very early 30s, after I made my definitive switch from flute to violin and viola, because I suddenly had all sort of musical opportunities and challenges to keep the musical parts (i.e. the non maternal) parts of myself occupied and stimulated out here in the "hinterlands." The next exciting period of "flow" happened for me when I started making arrangements for string quartet of pieces people wanted to have played at weddings. Once I became competent at making arrangements, I started writing music of my own, and 100 or so quartet arrangements and another 150 or so original pieces later, I have a pretty hefty body of work for lots of different instruments and voices.

For at least a dozen years the wedding quartet work was plentiful, but thanks to gig master (which encourages musicians to compete with one another for work), as well as the economics involved with wedding planning (something I'm starting to understand more clearly these days), only a scant handful of people seem to want string quartet music at their weddings in my area. That part of my life is in a major state of "ebb."

My arrangements aren't doing anyone any good festering on my computer, and publication is logistically out of the question (much of it is popular stuff--or once-popular stuff), so I have decided to make my string quartet arrangements available on line to anyone who wants to play them. I have loaded them into a dropbox folder to share.

Why do I share my work like this?

I do it to try, in my own small way, to make up for some of the terrible imbalances in a largely greedy and self-serving world. Its also a way to be involved (even if it is only passively) in more lively musical communities (wherever they happen to be) than the one I find myself in.

Please send me an e-mail message (elainefine [AT] gmail [DOT] com) if you would like to be invited to join this dropbox folder. The arrangements are entertaining for audiences, and they are a lot of fun to play.

Sober Thoughts from Ellen McSweeney

"The Power List: Why Women Aren't Equals in New Music and Innovation"

Everything Ellen McSweeney says is true, and the comments are interesting as well.

Lina & Serge

Simon Morrison's Lina & Serge looks at the life and times of Serge Prokofiev through the eyes of Lina, his cosmopolitan wife, who was born in Spain, and lived in high style in New York, Paris, Geneva, Tzarist Russia, and who struggled through life in Soviet Russia, eight years of which she spent as a prisoner in the gulag.

Lina (1897-1989) was a singer (and in all probability not a very good one). It is pretty clear that Serge Prokofiev's attraction to her had a lot to do with her beauty (and she was beautiful), and the fact that she was willing to have a physical relationship with him without being married. He only consented to marrying her after she became pregnant with his first son, and was a terribly distant father to both of their children. Serge Prokofiev's return to Russia (he met and married Lina in the West) was an opportunistic move on his part, and Lina and the children did their best to survive while conditions continued to crumble.

Eventually Serge, who did benefit professionally from the Soviet system, fell under the spell of a Mina, younger woman who was intent on breaking up his marriage with Lina and marrying him herself. When the Soviet government decided that the marriage between Lina and Serge was invalid because it was not a Soviet marriage, Serge was free to marry Mina. Lina was given work as a translator, and eventually government officials arrested her because of suspicions they had concerning her occasional meetings with foreigners (people she knew who were visiting the Soviet Union). She was sent to the gulag for eight years, and only obtained her release through the kindness of Dmitri Shostakovich. Three years after Serge's death (Serge died on the exact day and at the exact time as Josef Stalin!) the revocation of her marriage was reversed, and Serge Prokofiev became a posthumous bigamist.

This is one of the best composer biographies I have read (and I have read a lot of composer biographies). It describes the environment around Serge Prokofiev in believable intimate and personal detail (Morrison had a great deal of source material, and close contact with the family), even though the material he presents seems like a great piece of fiction.

As a man Serge Prokofiev is still a puzzle to me, but he was also clearly a puzzle to the people who knew him well. Morrison puts pieces of music into the context of Prokofiev's life, and he does so in a way that makes perfect sense. He presents everyday life in the Soviet Union in a way that rings frightfully true, and he describes (through Lina's eyes) the presence and importance of music in the gulag, something I could never have imagined.

When she was released from the gulag, Lina had to sign an oath of silence. I'm glad that she didn't honor it.

You can read more about the book here.

Birthday Piece No. 5

I'm a little ahead of schedule on my yearly birthday pieces for viola d'amore and piano, but this one serves two purposes: to mark my upcoming birthday at the end of the month, and to celebrate Bernard Zaslav's 87th birthday today. Notice that the meter is 5/4 and the piece has 54 measures (I'll be 54 on April 30), and the tempo is 87 to the quarter.

I finished writing the piece in time for Bernie's birthday, but it will take ma a while to learn to play it, so a computer-generated version will have to do for the time being.

Here's a link to the music.

Veronika, der Lenz is da!

Spring is finally here! Let's hear Max Raabe and the Palast Orchestra (a group that performs in the here and now, and on this Wednesday in Los Angeles) celebrate it in the appropriate style! (just listen--don't look at those strange eyes in the photo.)

Campagnoli and Bach?

Bartolomeo Campagnoli (1751-1827) published his Opus 22 Capricci for solo viola in Leipzig in 1815. They are important etudes for the viola because they are original for the instrument, and they are rewarding to practice. There isn't much known about Campagnoli, though I did read somewhere that he was one of Rodolphe Kreutzer's (1766-1831) teachers, and it is certainly possible that Campagnoli learned some of his craft from Tartini, either through personal contact or through his music.

One look at Kreutzer #11

and this variation of Campagnoli #25



makes the relationship between these two composers abundantly clear. I imagine that Kreutzer figured that Campagnoli's technical paramaters for the viola (i.e. writing etudes that would build technique and not cause injury) would be just right for an all-purpose intermediate book of etudes for the violin. There is no doubt in my mind that he pilfered passages here and there.

Even though they were published in Bonn in 1802, only a few violinists knew about Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas. They weren't really known until 1943, when Ferdinand David made his edition; and even then they were not well known until they were performed by the famous Joseph Joachim. I used to think that Kreutzer might have been one of the few violinists who had the 1802 publication because of how Bach-inspired his 37th Caprice sounds.



But then I noticed that Campagnoli's 33rd Caprice for viola is practically a study on Bach's C-major Fugue.



Then there's his 5th Caprice:



But the real clincher is an outright quote of the Chaconne in Campagnoli's 24th Caprice:



This makes me wonder if it it was Campagnoli and not Kreutzer or David who was the 19th-century's first window to the solo violin music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Here's a link to the first publication of the Campagnoli Caprices, and one to the 1850 publication of the Kreutzer Caprices.

Renaissance Polymeter!

It sounds like an April Fools joke, but it isn't! This piece by the Renaissance composer Christopher Tye (c. 1505-c. 1572) is the last of a set of 21 instrumental pieces that share the same cantus firmus. They begin simply, and become increasing complex as they go along. In this, the final piece of the set, Tye puts the two upper voices in 3/4 time, and the three lower voices in 4/4 time. I imagine he amused (or perhaps frustrated) his friends with this.



You can listen to it here.

One Grain More (One More Les Miserables Parody)

"Vulnerability is our Most Accurate Measurement of Courage"

This is from Brené Brown's TED talk about vulnerability and shame. What she has to say is well worth paying attention to and taking to heart, particularly if you, like me and like most relatively sane people, have occasional bouts of vulnerability.

Brené Brown hits several nails squarely on the head. She answered many of my innermost questions about why I do what I do. I always feel vulnerable when I write music, and I always feel vulnerable when I play concerts, but I really need to both play and write because getting from "want" to the other side of "can't" is one of the things that I feel makes my life worth living.

Brené Brown really opened up my eyes today. I hope her talk opens up your eyes too (whoever and wherever you may be).

Speaking of concerts, I'm playing one this coming Thursday: Music for violin, viola, and piano (in various combinations) by Poulenc, Vierne, and Jongen, featuring a performance with narrator of Francis Poulenc's Histoire de Babar.

Here's an announcement. If you happen to be in the area, please come! Admission is free, parking is ample, and you might just win a free Babar book at the end of the concert.

Value by the Numbers or is Enough is Enough?

With the exception of the call from our son, every phone call that we got yesterday was from an earnest person sitting in a calling center who was trying to raise money for something having to do with the problems we have with our government. I find it difficult to understand why those of us who benefit least from the "free market economy" (like musicians and teachers) are called upon to finance attempts at achieving some kind of social justice in this country. Perhaps my memory is a bit clouded, but until recently nobody asked for money to support issues that the people we pay through our taxes are supposed to work for. These were not pleas to contact people in congress. They were pleas for cash.

What is this world coming to when everything seems to have some kind of "bottom line?" How is throwing money at a problem going to actually solve the problem, particularly when the root of problem clearly involves the basic greed of an entity over which, even in a supposedly democratic society, the voice of the people doesn't seem to matter? Do corrupting people have a "price?"

I have slowly watched our world move from one in which quantity is really replacing quality. A television show's ratings do not come from critical commentary. They come from how many millions of people watched it. The value of a pop music recording comes from how many millions of people have either downloaded it or have bought it. Then there are twitter followers and facebook likes. Those quantity ratings are more a product of marketing than of actual worthwhile matter.

A relatively small number of people care about the general stuff that "classical" musicians care about. It was once part of popular culture, but that was back in the days when popular culture consisted of a far smaller number of people competing for attention. Symphony orchestras didn't have to make themselves look slick and robust in order to compete with the "Ice Capades" (which once also employed musicians), or whatever shows happened to be in town (like, say, the circus). Now, in cities where there is fierce competition for the leisure dollar, they do. And once they do, they are still mainly judged by the number of people who buy tickets and not by the quality of the performances. Critical professional reviewers are getting rarer and rarer. Bloggers, in some cases, have taken their places, but the word of a non-paid blogger is not valued nearly as highly as a reviewer who draws a small salary from a well-known publishing entity.

Then there's the matter of money. The other night there was coverage on the PBS New Hour about the San Francisco Symphony strike. It tried to be unbiased, but the numbers they used made the musicians look like they were asking for too much (the numbers they used averaged the principal salaries in with the non-principal ones). A person who didn't care much about music, or didn't appreciate the quality of the San Francisco Symphony might wonder what the fuss was about. The "media" celebrates the large amount of money that people in the entertainment and business fields make, but when it comes to musicians, who matter to a small segment of the population, the numbers look disproportionately big.

In reality, factory workers (when there were factory jobs) make more money than most orchestral musicians. If you interviewed a bunch of people on the street and asked them if they would like to hear a concert played by a bunch of musicians they never heard of who made less money for their work than factory workers, do you think those people would spend money ($20-50) to hear them play?

[I should add that for each of those + or - $30,000 per year orchestral jobs (in the rare case of a vacancy), there would be hundreds upon hundreds of highly skilled applicants with advanced degrees from major music schools competing for a single seat.]

Two Must-See Documentaries about Carlos Kleiber

Carlos Gimeno (a very kind person) put this excellent 2010 Carlos Kleiber documentary, Traces to Nowhere, on YouTube last month, along with the not-as-well-translated documentary I am Lost To the World.

Snows of Yesteryear

I love walking in the snow, bundled from top to toe. The snow, as you can see above, is thick and wet. It's the kind of snow that makes you want to stay out all day. While I walked, I listened to a podcast from Los Angeles that had a brief segment about Leroy Anderson (so I was walking in the early spring to the tune of "Sleigh Ride"), a segment devoted to the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (with that "snow" music), and Dylan Brody telling a story about Christmas at his childhood home and his memories of listening to the recording of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." All snows of yesteryear.

World Peace, Hummus, and The Long-Handled Spoons

One of my favorite books of childhood was one called The Long-Handled Spoons. I can't find reference to a copy of it anywhere on line--not in a library, or in any of the specific search sites that have worked for me in the past. I remember the story well: It was about a French army regiment that was starving. They had delicious soup to eat, but all they had to eat it with were long-handled spoons. They bent their elbows to try to bring the spoons to their mouths, but it didn't work (oh how I loved those illustrations that had soup spilling all over the place). The solution to this regiment's problem (suggested by a child, I believe) was to feed one another with their long-handled spoons. By doing this they learned that in order to survive with the tools we have, we need to cooperate.

This made me think of Hummus, the favorite food of Daniel Barenboim, and a food that has been popular all over the middle east since at least the 13th century. The ingredients are simple: chickpeas, lemon, sesame, garlic, and spices, and there are as many variations on the theme as there are variations on the theme of bread (flour, water, yeast, salt).

In my utopian Hummus-fed imagination, I think it would be nice to replace Hamas with Hummus, and have with some friendly (or even not-so-friendly) competition over who makes the best Hummus (not who owns the rights to it!). Perhaps some day peace in the middle east could involve people celebrating their similarities and differences, and feeding one another rather than trying to eliminate one another from their small but important corner of the world. Perhaps the solution to peace in the middle east would be easier if Hummus were not a food that you eat with your hands.

I used sprouted chickpeas for the last batch of Hummus I made. You soak the dried chickpeas overnight, drain them, rinse them once or twice a day, and allow them to grow little tails (it takes 2-3 days, but you don't need to do any labor aside from the occasional rinse). The act of sprouting causes the chickpeas to convert their starch into sugar. You can eat them raw, if you like, but if you want to make them into Hummus, you need to boil them for half an hour or so. They mush up very easily, and they make far better Hummus than the cooked chickpeas you buy in a can, and it tastes far better than anything you buy in a grocery store.

Acts of Unconscious Influence

Did you ever notice how similar the beginning of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht is to the opening of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony?

Mozart, Haydn, and J.J. Rousseau

I have always been fascinated with the relationship of Mozart to Haydn, and Mozart to Rousseau, and Mozart and Haydn to Freemasonry, so in graduate school I jumped on the opportunity to write a paper about it. I recently installed Microsoft Word on my MacBook, and yesterday I was finally able to see a nifty timeline that I made as an appendix to the paper. I must have given my only paper copy to someone, and until yesterday I thought it was lost forever. Now I can share it here with anyone who might be interested. If you click on the pictures they will be easier to read.









If you want a PDF, you can download one here.

The Lure of the Superficial

It gets more and more difficult to get music appreciation students to even try to understand Beethoven. Year after year I find fewer and fewer students really care to engage in Beethoven beyond a melody or two. In Daniel Barenboim's "Beethoven and the Quality of Courage" that just appeared in the New York Review of Books, he mentions that Beethoven was unable to write anything superficial. Perhaps the problem lies in the undeniable fact that our young people are being bombarded with so much superficiality in their lives (much of it technologically produced) that some of them never learn to separate the superficial from the essential. Perhaps Beethoven's "in your face" substantialness is too much for many of them to deal with.

I fear that the gradual and deliberate "on-lining" of education will not teach students how to separate the essential from the superficial. After learning how to separate the superficial from the non-superficial the old-fashioned way, it is possible to derive value from anything, but people first need to learn how to learn in order to be able to do the self-directed type of learning that is necessary when studying something solely by way of a computer. That kind of learning is certainly not being taught in the high schools that are suffering from years and years of teaching "to the test."

When it is difficult to engage people in learning material that isn't necessarily going to be "on the test," how can you expect them to move forward and become truly educated.

I have never been able to "do" being superficial with any degree authenticity (irony intended). I also don't recognize superficiality until after the fact.

Now it's time to share a poem by Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, up on the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd stay away . . .

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door . . . (Slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Carlos Kleiber Conducting Beethoven 4 and 7

Music making rarely gets better than this!



Here's a link to all things Kleiber on YouTube.

A good answer to the Big Question

can be found in Korinthia's Quiet Corner.

Music and the Unconscious

There is nothing supernatural about the idea of the unconscious, though the feelings I hold (and share with Jung) about the collective unconscious might raise a few skeptical eyebrows. I suppose I draw upon that part of my (our) mind when I write music, and I also draw upon it when I play. That's just the way it is.

This evening I found this terrific article by Alan Walker that was published in the British Medical Journal in 1979, and I thought I would share it here. Walker discusses the possible relationship between the work of Sigmund Freud and Heinrich Schenker (though Freud wasn't big on music), and he tells other interesting stories about musical unconsciousness in action. In the article he quotes Blaise Pascal:

You would not have sought me unless you had already found me.

That about sums it up for me.

Here's a lot more from Pascal.

Dylan Brody Talks About Social Networking vs. Talent

A strong education in the arts, a love of the English language, the true joy I take in performing, have left me ill-prepared for a career in a world in which “likes” and “follows” are plural nouns and “friend” is a verb.

I just heard this segment of a podcast from KPPC's Off Ramp today, and thought I'd share it. Alan Brody, Dylan Brody's father, taught him that talent and persistence were all you needed to succeed. That is what I grew up believing as well, but the nature of success has changed profoundly. Social media is indeed the new main way success is measured.

At least in music, competence, mixed with luck, social skills, and location, can get you some of the small amount of playing work that still exists. As much as we complain and fret about the problems we have trying to carve out a living playing and writing music (the "classical kind"), the role social media plays when trying to have success in other fields of entertainment is much greater.

I Nearly Plotzed

Here are a few images from "The Night the Saints Lost Their Halos", an episode from the 1962 season of Naked City.

Plotz? It's a joke, of course. And who ever heard of Kopchunkas? Michael and I did notice that the character named Dr. Anna Chaloupka got her name from Hugh Chaloupka, the brilliant editor of the series. I love the music. Some of it is by Nelson Riddle, and some of it is by Billy May. Much of the music in the Billy May episodes consists of clever and beautifully orchestrated variations on the main theme (which runs through my head day and night). The images of New York are stunning, and the frames are packed with details: neon, drug store interiors, a booming furnace in the basement of a huge building in Washington Heights, lots of two-door station wagons, and images that remind us that Fifth Avenue was once a two-way street.

Overheard

PERSON 1: "Conductors are like dogs: they all have different personalities."

PERSON 2: ". . . and some are real bitches!"