Cui the Cuitic

“If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff's, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.”

When I heard the recording of the performance we gave the other night of Cui's violin sonata, I instantly realized that the first and last movements of the piece were not worth forcing my family or my closest friends to listen to. The second movement, however, being an imitation of Tchaikovsky, is really quite nice.

Anyway, had I known that Cui was such a nasty "Cuitic," I would have thought twice before putting so much effort into playing his sonata. Perhaps I was wrong to put so much stock in Cui (hoping that by working on his piece diligently enough I could make it worthwhile), but I certainly know that Cui was wrong about Rachmaninoff.

Demonic Viola d'amore!

Normally the head of a viola d'amore is a blindfolded cupid. You see the occasional animal head, and the occasional uh-blindfolded woman, but it is very rare that you see a male head, and even more rare to see one with horns! This instrument was made by Devin Hough for Daniel Geiger. You can see more detail here.

Why I Could Never be a Soloist

I suppose it is every young musician's dream to have a career as a soloist: to be able to travel from city to city playing concerts, sometimes playing with orchestra, and sometimes playing recitals. I suppose that soloists are "wired" to have a certain repertoire that they play over and over again, honing and improving their interpretations from concert to concert, delving deeper and deeper into the pieces they play. It is a fulfilling (but often lonely) life for a select group of people.

I am not wired that way. Actually, when I play a recital it is kind of like an information "dump." I work and work (and work and work) on a group of pieces, and then the performance is like a release. I do everything in my power (technically and musically) to make the experience meaningful, sometimes working for months and months to acquire the technique to play the music at hand; and then, after the concert, I am free to forget everything and move on. I can still enjoy the music while it runs through my head, or even my fingers, but I appreciate it from a distance. It is no longer my responsibility to bring it to life. Perhaps I might return to a piece or two in a number of years, but it would only be for a visit, not for a performance. There is much great music to learn and perform, and the practical lifespan of a musician is finite.

There are, of course, pieces of music that I will never perform, but I practice all the time, like solo Bach, a handful of concertos, and an array of etudes and caprices. These are like members of my family, and my experience with them is extremely special and private.

I prefer to be monogamous in my personal life, and to practice poly-whatever (is there a term?) in my recital playing (and, I suppose my musical life in general) than to have to endure life the other way around. Perhaps I am a musical equivalent of a Don Giovanni, and infinite possibilities await me after my evening with Bach, Bantock, and Cui. There is even space to write music now.

Ten Things to Love about Brass Playing

I just discovered Tine Thing Helseth's brass ensemble called tenThing. I'm thrilled that these Norwegian women are taking the brass world by storm, making it clear, once and for all, that gender isn't any kind of barrier for any instrument. It is simply remarkable how beautifully brass instruments can be played.

Bach, Bantock, and Cui

The heading of this post looks a little like the masthead of a law firm, but these people are the composers who wrote the music for a concert I am playing tomorrow night at Lake Land College in Mattoon, Illinois, to which you are invited.



It is very easy to get to Lake Land College from I-57 (it's about an hour south of Champaign--take the Route 45 exit and turn left). Once you get on campus, look for signs for the Administration Building on the south side of the campus. Here's a map that may help.

Easy-Ass Pie

I was shocked, shocked, I tell you. I couldn't find a single use of this phrase through google, so I have put a photo of what is left of today's very-easy-to-make pie that I call "Easy-Ass Pie" here for all the world to enjoy.

Preheat your oven to 375, and peel, core, and slice 8-10 small apples (or 4-5 bigger ones). Put them in a bowl with:

1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
a few generous shakes of cinnamon
a half teaspoon or so of nutmeg
1 quarter teaspoon (or less) of ground cloves
a dash of ginger, perhaps,
a dash of salt,
and a tablespoon of flour

Mix everything together.

For the crust all you need is a half a package of frozen filo dough, but you need to thaw it in the refrigerator overnight, so plan ahead. You also need a spray can of canola oil.

Spray your pie pan. Put on a layer of filo, and spray again. Keep layering and spraying until you have 10 or 12 layers (or half the number of layers in the half package). Pour in the apple mixture, and layer and spray more leaves of filo dough until you run out of leaves. Put the pie into the oven. Take it out in 45 minutes to an hour.

Share it with your friends while it is still warm. I felt very fortunate to be able to share it with my friend Martha this afternoon, and was happy to have more with Michael this evening.

Easy-Ass Pie!

What a Czardas!

Then, you have to hear Aleksandr Hrustevich play the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto! Who needs a violin or an orchestra when you can have an accordion?

Thomas Quasthoff and Daniel Barenboim

. . . in collaboration with Franz Schubert and Wilhelm Müller are sensational.


You can start the cycle from the beginning here.

The Most Efficient Scale System I Know

I have been spending a good deal of quality time with the scales that live in the back of the Sevcik Opus 8 book of shifting exercises, and I thought I would share them with other people who take pleasure in building technique. These two pages, I believe, contain everything any string player (or any player of any other instrument able to make its way through three octaves) might need in order to be comfortable playing passagework in any key, in any meter, and at any tempo.

If you practice these scales with a metronome, they work wonders. I think that they are beautifully set up and extremely economical: you get hours upon hours of really worthwhile practice out of just two pages. But, most of all, you have to think while you are practicing these scales. It is so easy to let your mind drift off when practicing "normal" scales. These modal scales keep you on task, particularly the minor scales in keys with a lot of sharps and flats.

I set my metronome at the quarter note in a conservative tempo (96-104), and practice the scales with sharps on one day and with flats on the next day (the Julius Baker approach). I vary the articulation (the bowings to string players), and I try to do it mindfully and deliberately.

The images will appear full size when you click on them.




Happy practicing.

The Dedicatee of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets

This is Paul I of Russia, who served at Emperor of Russia from 1796 until 1801, when he was assassinated. He was the son of Catherine the Great and the father of Alexander I, who, it turns out, was a violin student of Anton Ferdinand Titz. If you think Titz was an odd duck, look at this article about Paul.

In 1781 Haydn dedicated his Opus 33 Quartets to then Duke Paul, who spent 1781-1782 in the West. I find it unusually interesting that the set of quartets Titz wrote in 1781 also used the kind of equality among the four voices of the string quartet that Haydn used in his Opus 33.

Cooking with Mozart and Haydn

I made an interesting analogy in my music appreciation class the other day (it was off the cuff and on the fly, as many of my better analogies tend to be). I told the students that Haydn, as a composer, was the kind of person who could come over to your house and make a fantastic meal out of what you thought was a refrigerator and cabinets full of nothing. He would put usual things together in unusual ways, and make a feast for the imagination as well as the palate. Mozart, on the other hand, would come to your house loaded with all sorts of fresh produce (that he grew himself), and he would put those fresh ingredients (lots and lots of them) together in seemingly ordinary ways, but they would taste completely out of this world.

It would boggle the mind to even try to reproduce either of their meals.

Doesn't this make you curious?

I admit that my original interest in this CD was because of the composer's name, but I also was intrigued by the idea of this person, who lived from 1742 until 1810, being a composer for the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg. Up until this morning I thought that "western classical" music in Russia began with Glinka. Knowing about Anton Ferdinand Titz changes everything completely, especially since the music is terrific. This is definitely not the milquetoast Viennese Classical music that people come across from time to time when doing research for dissertations. This is forward-thinking music in the spirit of Haydn and Boccherini, but with a completely original compositional voice. Although Titz was not Russian by birth, he was the first Viennese Classical composer to write in Russia. That he used Russian folk material in his quartets is just a little more icing on the cake of historical re-thinking.

Here's his biography from Grove:

(b Nuremberg, c1742; d St Petersburg, 25 Dec 1810/6 Jan 1811). German violinist and composer, active in Russia. He was orphaned at an early age and was taught painting in Nuremberg by Johann C. and Barbara R. Dietzsch, his uncle and aunt. By the age of 16 he was a violinist at St Sebaldus’s church there. After an unhappy love affair a few years later he went to Vienna, where he played in the opera orchestra and may have studied with Haydn. In 1771 he became a member of the Hofkapelle in St Petersburg; Catherine the Great paid him the highest salary of any of her court musicians. He also taught at the theatre school, gave the future Tsar Aleksandr I violin lessons, directed a court chamber orchestra (which included the clarinettist Joseph Beer and other outstanding musicians), and performed publicly, for instance in 1782, but most of his performances were at court, as a violinist and viola d'amore player. Later in life he suffered a mental disorder that sometimes prevented him from working, but he was encouraged and protected by Senator A.G. Teplov, a St Petersburg amateur musician. He dedicated three string quartets to Teplov and three more to Aleksandr I.

Titz was particularly admired for his sensitive playing of adagio passages, but by the time Spohr met him in St Petersburg in 1803 his technical assurance had gone. His compositions are mainly chamber works in the Viennese Classical style; his string quartets strive for a large dramatic compass and the three upper parts have considerable independence. He also wrote some small vocal works (now lost), including Le pigeon bleu et noir gémit, a romance that was popular in Russian salons until the mid-19th century. He has often been confused with the Dresden violinist Ludwig Tietz.

The liner notes for this CD also include a quotation from the 60-year-old Ludwig Spohr.

"I also saw and listened to Titz, the famous mad violinist. We found a man of about forty with a glowing face and pleasant appearance. You could not tell he suffered from mental confusion. So we were all the more surprised when he asked each of us: 'My most gracious monarch, how are you feeling?' He then proceeded to relate to us a tall tale, containing very little common sense, and complained bitterly about an evil wizard, who was jealous of his violin playing and cursed his middle finger on his left hand so that he could no longer play, but he then said he thought he might be able to reverse the curse."

The music for the 12 quartets recorded by the Hoffmeister Quartet was discovered in the Academic Regional Library in Ulyanovsk by Andrey Reshetin. A modern edition has been made of the first quartet, and it was published in 2000. I hope that all the music will be made available for other quartets to play, perhaps through the Petrucci Library. I also wonder if Titz wrote anything for the viola d'amore?

Illustrated Van Gough Letters

I had no idea that Van Gough illustrated his letters. There is a beautiful selection with fascinating commentary by the artist over at BibliOdyssey.

Off Topic Grocery Store Moment

I was at the checkout counter of the grocery store yesterday--the express checkout, where they sell cigarettes. A young man was standing by the side of the checkout counter, and the person working the cash register, who knew the young man, asked him if he wanted something. He said that he didn't know. She asked him if he was there to buy cigarettes. The woman at the cash register suggested that he shouldn't buy cigarettes because he shouldn't smoke. The young man told the woman that he just wanted to buy them, not smoke them. He just turned 18, and could legally buy cigarettes. He said that he would just give them away. The woman mentioned that she was wary because he could give them to a minor. I chimed in. I couldn't help it.

ME: If you're 18 you should register to vote.

HE: I'm going there next.

ME: (to the cash register woman) You should tell him that now that he is 18 he is an adult, and that a responsible adult decision is not to smoke. (to the young man) Don't waste your money.

He stormed out of the store. The woman behind the cash register told me that he was mad at her, but she seemed grateful to have some support from the "outside world" (the young man was a store employee). I somehow doubt that he was on his way to the courthouse to register to vote, but it would be nice to think the the idea might have crossed his mind.

Visual Memory and Vision: Seeing Music

I could play music from memory when I played the flute, but I found that after about ten years of violin playing (and I started in my early 30s) I was unable to memorize much of anything. I attributed it to my relatively advanced age, instrumentally speaking. I always thought that my musical memory was dominated by muscle memory, because once I had an instrument in my hands, I could hold forth for quite a while. I used to think that my musical memory was a kind of limited dance between only the kinetic and the aural parts of my array of senses, but today I discovered that my musical memory is visual as well.

Those dang progressive lenses that I had been using for everything, including reading music, from about the age of 40 caused me to have to do so much "post processing" that my inner vision got itself all clouded up when trying to memorize music. Now, after only a month of using single-vision lenses for music, I can close my eyes and visualize specific passages of music that I am practicing as they appear on the page. I can even do it without closing my eyes.

This, to me, is a revelation.

1582 Irish Melodies: The George Petrie Collection

I should have been practicing this past hour or two, but instead I have been spending some enjoyable time playing through some of the 1582 Irish melodies that make up the George Petrie Collection of Irish Music that Charles V. Stanford edited and published in 1903. You can download all three volumes from the Petrucci Music Library and have almost as much fun as I had (or maybe more, if you share some of the "finds" with friends and family). Here's the preface:

Tonleiter, literally

Petrucci Music Library: The Queen of the Public Domain

As more and more great music slips into the public domain, and as documents move more freely than ever from person to person by way of the internet, the Petrucci Music Library grows larger and even more interesting by the day. The number of scores, as of yesterday, is 38,000. That's a lot of music.

This Library, which is part of the International Music Score Library Project, gets contributions from libraries, librarians, and musicians around the world. There are complete sets of orchestral parts to download, pieces of chamber music by well-known composers that I never knew existed, and a lot of music by excellent composers from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that I have never even heard of before. There are forums (in four languages) that discuss everything from copyright to musical analysis.

There were so many scores published on cheap paper during the late 19th-century and early 20th-century musical feast in Europe. Many are in such fragile shape that they are not allowed to travel out of their isolated homes on a handful of library shelves that are scattered around the world. Thanks to the people who manage this project, they can be downloaded here, and you can print them on good acid-free paper, giving them another life. You can play them. You can record them. You can share them with friends and students. You can study them.

The eventual goal of the Project is to create a virtual library of everything in the public domain. Now if that is not a significant contribution to the musical world, I don't know what is.

Popularity, relatively speaking

All worlds organize themselves into hierarchies, including worlds that only exist in the very abstract, like the "classical" music blogosphere. It is a world explored by a self-selecting group of people, and, with the exception of e-mail, the local weather, YouTube, and a news website or two, it is where I spend the most of my internet time. I keep this blog for my own sanity, and, perhaps, for the sanity of readers I do not know who have some of the same concerns and interests that I have. The things that matter to me are, for the most part, rarefied. Every once in a while, for example, I click on my profile links with the hope that someone else in the blogspot blogging world has a serious interest in Maurice Maeterlinck. It has not yet happened, but, in this world of infinite possibility, it just might.

Every once in a while I come across a post that ranks blogs that come under the umbrella of "classical music," and every once in a while I find this blog somewhere towards the bottom of the list (I believe it was 47 in a list of 50 for a while). The ranking, of course, is a quantitative one: how many "hits," how many "links," how many "feeds," or how a blog is ranked by a search engine. Because I don't use social networking tools like twitter or facebook, or any of the other icon-like things that I see floating around on various blogs, I imagine that in the giant "cafeteria" of the internet, the relative popularity of this blog will continue to fade.

But I will always try to keep the content interesting, I will do my best to use the English language well, and I will never use this blog for any kind of commercial advertising. I interact with a rarefied bunch of people in my non-blogging world, and popularity has never really been something I have sought out. I am often impressed with people who do seek it out, and by doing so manage to have the world reaching out to them. I have learned that I can never be one of those people, partly because I do not know how to be one of those people, and partly because I do not want to be one of those people. The gift that keeps on giving after turning 50 is the realization that what you see is what you get: 50 years of being a certain way makes a good precedent to continue operating by the same set of balances that keep me happy and productive.

I feel like this free and ever-changing blogosphere, however, is fragile. Perhaps it will no longer be free in a few years. Perhaps some entity will find a way to profit from the self-expression and community-creating that it allows, and then everything will change. Until that time, I really appreciate the ability to play in this "playground," and to share my particular quirks and interests (and gripes, and criticisms, and music) with the people who care to read about them here, even if they just drop in by chance.

Amazing Male Soprano, Amazing Vivaldi Cantata

A Sense of Audience

One great pleasure that I have during the High Holy Days is playing Kol Nidre for the Yom Kippur eve service. Every year my experience is different: some years I think of the experience as a very personal one, and I "use" the piece as a way of working out my various feelings connected with the text of the prayer, which basically involves the chance to relinquish "resolutions" made in one year in order to clean the figurative slate for making new vows for the coming year. Often some of my greatest misgivings come from not having practiced enough viola to make my rendition of the Kol Nidre as good as I would like it to be. I always vow to play it better the next year.

This year I thought less about myself (though I was certainly self-critical to a point), and I thought more about my audience. Not my audience upstairs, as it were, but my audience of congregants who have come to depend on listening to the Kol Nidre as a way of helping to release them from their vows. It is a great responsibility to play in a way that allows other people to feel. It also involves an interesting dance between various parts of the "self." If I include too much of my own emotional "stuff," I make the playing of the piece too much about me. There is no room for anyone else in the emotional space because it is all taken up by me. If I do not include enough of my own emotional "stuff," the playing is not engaging enough to welcome people in. Their minds wander, and the whole purpose of the prayer (even without the words) is lost. It is a very complicated balance.

This relationship with the audience certainly extends itself into all areas of performance, whether religious, non religious (though, for those who would say their religion is music, there is no non-religious musical space), public, or private. Playing for people is a way of letting them into the music. By extension, writing music for musicians is a way of letting them into the music--allowing them to have a vehicle to use in order to express themselves, and, in turn, when they play it for people, to allow them to feel. No matter how you look at it (or listen to it) there is a great deal of responsibility involved with all parts of the musical continuum.

Granville Bantock

This photo, taken 100 years ago, tells a great deal about the music of Granville Bantock.

Real Music

I was very disappointed a handful of years ago when I overheard a musician I really respect advise a conductor not to bother with "x" kind of music and to program "real" music for an upcoming concert season. Perhaps my friend was trying to impress the conductor. I don't know, but the phrase "real music" has bothered me for years. I come across the phrase from time to time, spoken by both practicing musicians, and by those who do not play. It bothers me every time I hear it.

What is real music anyway? What makes it not real (whatever "x" kind of music might have been) as opposed to real?

Aside from talking about music, we rarely use the term "real" non literally. An example of real piece of art would be an original work, not its reproduction. An example of a real piece of real furniture would be an actual bed rather than a piece of foam on the floor. Real vanilla extract would be different from imitation vanilla extract. Real meat would be different from fake meat. A real friend would be different from a fair-weather friend. A real diamond would be different from a piece of cut glass. A real signature on a check would be different from a forgery. A real dog is very different from a toy dog. Real cheese is different from imitation cheese.

If I play a piece by Granville Bantock (and I'm working on one now), it is no less real than a piece by Edward Elgar, or Johannes Brahms, yet because Bantock is not a particularly popular composer these days (please leave a comment if you have even heard of him before looking him up on google), he could be dismissed as being an unknown composer (at least to most people), and therefore not important. His music could be dismissed as being "not real" because it is no longer part of the standard repertoire.

If Bantock pays homage to Brahms by using similar voicing once in a while, or if he imitates Bizet by quoting a motive from Carmen, does that make Bantock's music "imitation Brahms" or "imitation Bizet." If Bach imitates Vivaldi, does that make Bach's music "imitation Vivaldi?" I don't think so.

Happy Anniversary Michael!

It is hard to believe that our wedding was twenty-five years ago today! And who would have even imagined back in 1984 that we could celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary with our friends in anything remotely related to the idea of a blogosphere? A lot has gone down these past 25 years, and in the process both of us have certainly grown up.

How to Dance Minuet (or two)

Intervals: what happens between the notes

One thing that recorded music can never seem to reproduce is the stuff that happens in the air when you play resonant double-stops on a stringed instrument. A particularly good instrument (or a group of instruments) will excite a whole rainbow of vibrating resonances, that dance around like a group of excited atoms. A good set of speakers and a set of extremely sensitive microphones can come close to capturing what happens on the surface during a given moment, but the beauty of live performance (or live practice) is that each time you play--even the same written notes--the set of phantom rainbow resonances that happens inside of the intervals, inside of the double-stops, is different. The set of dancing rainbow resonances even varies over the duration of a double-stop, even if the double stop only lasts for a very short amount of time.

There is a universe inside of a perfect fifth, particularly because, in addition to all the magical dancing atomic rainbow vibrations, it contains implied possibilities that are sometimes filled in by the imagination of the listener (and player), and are sometimes filled in by the addition of a major or minor third, which throws those atomic rainbow resonances into a whole new hierarchy.

Darwin the Musician

While responding to a comment on a previous post I came across this bit of information which is too good not to share.

Nothing is known about Darwin's musical disposition as a child. There is no indication that he ever played a musical instrument, nor had an appreciation of music in general. As a young man Darwin acquired a taste for classical music while studying at Cambridge University. He often visited King's College there, and would sit for hours listening to the church choir.

What is interesting about Darwin's fondness for music is that he was tone deaf, and had a very difficult time recalling a tune he just heard the day before. Darwin was also unable to hum a tune properly, or keep time to music as he was listening to it. As far as specific composers go, he loved the symphonies and overtures of Mozart, Handel and Beethoven. In the evenings his wife, Emma, who was quite an accomplished pianist (she was trained by Frederic Chopin), would play for him on her piano forte as he reclined on a nearby sofa.

from AboutDarwin.com

Crazy for God

I have been spending a significant part of these past two days of awe reading Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as one of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer, and found much more in this memoir than I expected to find.

I first learned of the book through an interview on Fresh Air back in December. I was expecting an expose of the inner workings on the beginnings of the Christian "Right" movement, and a detailed explanation of how relatively innocent people allowed it to mushroom into something that has become terribly ugly and powerful. What I found was a beautiful memoir about an extremely unusual childhood in a family with larger-than-life parents and larger-than-life freedoms in extraordinarily beautiful places, interspersed with vignettes involving personally-moving experiences with music and art.

Frank Schaeffer's father, was, in addition to being a self-taught theologian, a pure humanist with a great love and understanding for art, music, and the beauties of nature. He was also, by Frank's account, a emotionally uneven (perhaps bipolar) and often absent father who showed one face to his religious disciples and another to Frank's mother, who put up with a great deal of abuse in exchange for the opportunity to hold a highly important place in what was to become a superstar-studded world-wide religious movement.

It is rather riveting to read about being a child living in a religious-retreat-community in the Swiss Alps during the 1960s. Frank's childhood was unusually free. Everyone was always busy with their work (or rather "The Work"), and he tells wonderful stories about the mostly American guests that he got to know at the retreat.

Frank's undiagnosed dyslexia made it impossible for his homeschooling-minded family to teach him his basic subjects, so he was sent to a series of English boarding schools for much of his childhood. His coming of age (and his escape from a particularly unfair boarding school) coincided with the dawning of hippie culture. The religious community was visited regularly by young Christian pilgrims interested in finding some kind of "truth." They came to learn at the feet of Frank's father, while indulging in all the trappings that came with being a young person in the early 1970s. Frank's father bent with the times, and became a kind of "cool" Dad for a while, before eventually reverting to the staunch ideology of his earlier years.

Frank apologizes for his father again and again by mentioning at every opportunity just how much his father cared about art, music, and beauty. He draws a loving portrait of a flawed human being. There are also apologies for his mother, who talked very frankly (sorry--but there is no better word) about things that he really didn't need to know concerning her relationship with his father.

Frank grew up to become a "propaganda" film maker for the religious right. His father, who became an icon of the movement, was the star. They made lots and lots of money. There was (and still is) a lot of money to be made in the religious media business, and, as Frank points out, a lot of influence to be won. Eventually he left the religious media business and the evangelical movement altogether. This is both his confession and his apology. Every time this book is read, the apology is repeated. May it be read many, many, many times.

Facebook (an administrative note)

In the off chance that some of my Facebook friends feel insulted by the fact that I no longer appear in their roster of Facebook friends, my experiment with re-connecting with people from my the past by way of the daily update is over (not that I ever really used the daily update as a means of communication).

I am, of course, always happy hear from old not-necessarily-only-facebook friends (and new ones, and blog readers) by way of e-mail or phone, but I just can't complicate my creative life with so many reminders from my (not always happy) past lives.

Another look into the future

Check out all that "modern" art on the walls!

The Future is Now (1955) (by way of Paleo-Future)

Music of the Future

John Elfreth Wakins, Jr. made a series of predictions in 1900 that were printed in the Ladies Home Journal. Some predictions have actually come to pass, and some predictions, like the entry about education, should come to pass. The section about music is priceless.

Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented.

This comes via Paleo-Future, where I predict you will be spending a lot of time today. I know I will.

(Thanks Rachel!)

A Great Rossini Story

"He was a strange fellow. He manufactured some brandies, gave a few music lessons, and in that way made ends meet. He never owned a bed--he slept standing up . . . . At night he wrapped himself in his cloak, and slept thus in a corner of any arcade. The nightwatchman knew him and didn't disturb him. Then, at the crack of dawn, he would come to me, pull me out of bed--which I didn't like at all--and then I had to play for him. Sometimes when he hadn't rested enough, he'd go to sleep standing up again while I was working at the spinet. I'd take advantage of that in order to crawl back into bed. On waking up again, he'd look for me there and would be gratified by my assurances that while he had been asleep I had played my pieces without mistakes."

Gioccino Rossini's description to Ferdinand Hiller of his early studies in Bologna with Guiseppi Prinetti.

So Sad: An Aside

This 10 minute video "documentary" taken in Washington D.C. during the recent anti-u-name-it rally, shows the poor education level of the adults who showed up. It is tragic, actually. It's even more tragic than the messages these people have on their signs.

After a decent health care plan gets passed, we have to do something about education, and we have to do it soon. We can't afford to have another generation with any significant percentage of adults as under-educated as the people in this video. It is very clear that these people have been terribly manipulated by powerful entities (corporate as well as religious) that take advantage of their low level of education. I imagine that the powerful entities have serious contempt for these people outside of their use for them as "the base" or a "voting body." These people would be better served to direct their anger towards the people who are trying to (and succeeding to) manipulate them, fuel their deepest fears, and feed them misinformation to repeat and distribute on line.

These people have fallen prey to the ravings of lunatics who dominate certain areas of the airwaves and cable television. I'm sure that many of them mean well, but they appear not to be educated enough to separate reason from propaganda. Many of these people only came to this event because "big brother" on their television told them that they needed to go to Washington on the day after September 11th to voice their anger. That's all they know. That's all many of them need to know. It is terribly sad.

Thank you to Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll for taking the time and energy to film this.

She had a song to sing, all over this land

Mary Travers (1936-2009)

Rare 1941 Dinu Lipati Test Recordings

Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 116 No. 2 in A minor
Bach, Chorale in G major "Jesus bleibet meine Freude"
Scarlatti, Sonata in G major L. 387
Chopin, Etude in G flat major Op. 10 No. 5


(A big thanks to Eliane Lust!)

And here's a Lipati motherlode to use as a therapeutic ladder of escape for those times when the world seems to be too small, too difficult to understand, and too complicated to negotiate.

Competition

I used to be competitive when I was a child, and it really messed me up. I used to count the number of lines in the plays I was in, and I would measure my strength as an actress by how many I had. I (childishly, since I was a child) believed that the people who had fewer lines than I had were, clearly, not as good as I was. But the people who had more were, somehow, superior to me. I used to think that if I tried hard enough I too could get leading roles, but it didn't happen. By the time I made it to Junior High, I was comparatively short, not built like a dancer, and wasn't the leading-lady type. In spite of the fact that I knew every line and every song in every Jr. High School show, and I went to all the rehearsals, I spent my acting time in the offstage chorus.

There were already very good flutists in my school who played in the orchestras for the shows, so I remained in the chorus. I started playing the flute towards the end of seventh grade, and I decided to work really hard at it. After a few years of hyper-competitiveness, I eventually learned that the only real reward for hard work was in the work itself and in the ability to play. My competitive spirit worked its way out of my psyche, thank goodness, by the time I entered Juilliard (which, I suppose is the ultimate "lion's den" of musical competition). There was also no possible way I could compete with my classmates, so I simply didn't. I got myself onto a path of doing music for its own sake, and I believed that if I really worked hard enough, the quality of what I did would speak for itself.

Why is competition considered such a virtue? A quick Google search gleaned 61,300,000 websites on which to find competition quotes. Perhaps competition is an addiction like gambling. Perhaps the thrill of bettering another person gives a momentary sense of value to the winner. Perhaps that sense of defeat that surrounds the loser gives motivation to win next time. Perhaps it is exciting for kids to compete, but, in my eyes, using childish games as the major measure of accomplishment in the world, is simply childish. There should be room in the world for everyone who does anything of value, but that doesn't look like it is the case when I look at the view through my window, computer screen, and television.

Competition has made its way into everything: music (in all its forms), fashion, drama, art, architecture, cake decorating, cooking, raising animals, education, attractiveness, physical fitness in all its possible forms, and even blogging. Being successful in business doesn't necessarily mean that you have a good product or service to sell. It means that your goods and services are chosen over the goods and services of the competition, for reasons that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual quality of what you do.

It seems that television has become one large game show, expanding the boundaries of competition to the ridiculous. It is hard to watch cable television during any given hour of the day and not find at least one show that involves some kind of a competition (in between the commercials, that is). Even the news, particularly the cable news, treats every stage of politics as a game (in between commercials, that is).

Sadly, it is those of us who choose not to compete that end up being relative non-participants in the continually competitive game of life.

Don't Judge a Book by its Title

I found Joseph H. Kupfer's Prostitutes, Musicians, and Self-Respect: Virtues and Vices of Personal Life through a Google search concerning self-serving musicians (another rant that I will spare for another post), and imagined, from the excerpt that I read on Google Books, that it might contain some interesting ideas (in the sections of the book that were not available on line). I didn't buy the book. Michael was able to get it through inter-library loan for me, and had a look at it before I did, since the book made it from his office to our living room by way of his backpack.

On first glance he mentioned that it looked like a philosophy book, and he asked me where I found it. I told him. He looked in the index for "music" and told me that there was nothing there. I, in my infinite optimism, imagined that the coverage of the subject of music would be so large that an entry in an index would be superfluous, but I was totally wrong. The subject of music, in the context of self-respect and the idea of prostitution, gets only a tiny mention in the title chapter of the book (which is the ultimate chapter), and it only comes through a discussion of "Sex, a Feminist Perspective," an article from 1986 by Janet Radcliffe-Richards. Kupfer tells us that Radcliffe-Richards "compares the prostitute to the musician. She sees nothing worse about people selling their services to produce sexual pleasure in other than in selling musical services to produce aesthetic pleasure."

Reflections on this argument could move into interesting territory, but Kupfer argues against it in an unsatisfying way. I will quote:

When gifted people capable of creative work forgo the chance to undertake artistically worthwhile projects in order merely to please or make money, we speak of them as prostituting themselves. They have sold out. We need to say "merely" to please or make money because nothing is wrong with pleasing or making money provided the musicians are being true to themselves. This requires pursuing art commensurate with their talents and is likely to develop nonmusical dimensions of themselves as well as their musical abilities. The risk of genuine failure and the discipline required in meeting such a challenge often bring with them nonmusical growth. For example, it takes courage to put one's best efforts on the line. Then, too, humility may be required to seek help or accept one's true limitations. If we never take our best shot, then we can always deceive ourselves by rationalizing that we could have done superlative work had we only tried."

That is pretty much the whole musical discussion. No wonder the word "music" didn't earn a place in the index!

Gee. I could write a book about the myriad humiliations that musicians put themselves through in the course of trying to live a musical life. I have seen, lived through, and experienced many situations that would make a musician's life similar to that of a prostitute. The biggest difference for me between music and prostitution is that music is sacred, and the understanding of a small corner of it through study and practice, is the greatest reward there is. There is, as far as I know, very little personal reward in trading sex for money, aside from the money.

Orchestral musicians put themselves through a large range of humiliations, both social and hierarchical, in order to play professionally (a glance at Blair Tindall's Mozart in the Jungle will give a pretty good idea how much sex-related trade there is in the world of music--and she just touches the tip of the iceberg). Freelance musicians have to vie for position in the eyes of contractors, which sometimes can lead to circumstances that violate appropriate ethical behavior. Orchestral conductors have been known to humiliate musicians that they don't particularly like, for reasons that often have nothing to do with the music at hand, and the stretching of personal boundaries between musicians of influence and musicians new to the profession is, and always has been, quite common.

Perhaps self-promotion, which is considered a musical virtue these days, a little akin to prostitution. As a person who would rather do things than promote what I do, I feel that a piece of music, a performance, or even a lesson or a class should "speak" for itself. I also feel that each musical act accomplishes a purpose, and that purpose is not to reflect on the "greatness" of the person performing that act. For me, in the instance of a piece I am writing, the purpose is to have something that is useful and can bring some kind of emotional and social pleasure to the people playing it and hearing it. The purpose, in the case of a concert I play, is to fill alienating silent spaces with something that can unite all the people in them (including the often-no-longer-alive composer) by making it possible for the audience to enjoy music that is vibrant, fluid, free from technical "blemishes," and is emotionally and intellectually engaging. I believe that voluntarily playing a concert for free or writing a piece for the fun of it has nothing to do with prostitution. But playing a concert for free for a paying audience is extremely humiliating. And writing a piece that a publisher sells without reporting the sales to the composer (or sending royalty checks) is a good way to compromise a composer's self-respect.

I'll stop now. And I'll return this book to the library right away.

Edda, Jetta, and Hans

I devoted a large chunk of my afternoon watching Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale on a commercial television channel that managed to infuse this nearly three-hour-long movie with three more hours of commercials. It was painful to wait between segments, but, being a long time devotee of Andersen, I pressed on. I enjoyed the film a great deal, and I particularly appreciated the way the film was written, even though most of the film's plot was indeed a fairy tale. Terri Windling's article about Andersen's life will help anyone separate fact from pure fiction, or fairy tale.

The film's writer was able to mold the story of "The Snow Queen" to fit the needs of the film's plot, and he was also able to make Jenny Lind a central dramatic character. I was rather impressed with the fictional character of "Jetta," (the woman with the dark hair in the above film clip) who served as the third member of a love triangle with Jenny Lind. I wonder if Kit Hesketh-Harvey, the film's writer, gave the Jetta (pronounced "Yetta") character her name because of the Edda, the source from which Andersen might have drawn some of the mythic material he used in his stories.

In my Snow Queen opera, published in 2003, two years after this film was made, by the way, I gave the grandmother character in the story the name Edda. I knew about the name because my step-grandmother was named Etta (pronounced "Edda") and it seemed perfectly appropriate, almost serendipitous to give her that name. The Edda-Jetta connection here, if it is one made from the folkloric connection, is also serendipitous. In searching (in vain) for a way of contacting the screenwriter, I learned that we share the same birthday. Triple serendipity.

Interpreting Avant-Garde Music

I'll leave writing a detailed review of the music that Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell played at the Chicago Jazz Festival earlier this evening to Michael, and will spend my two cents on the person interpreting the concert visually for people who could not hear the music. This was my first purely instrumental concert with an interpreter for the deaf and hard of hearing. I imagine an instrumental concert is quite a challenge for an interpreter.

Michael and I arrived early enough to hear a set played by the Jeff Parker Quartet, and ensemble I particularly liked because the keyboard player played a Hammond Organ. I noticed the interpreter, who, moving to the rhythm of the music, tried to transmit what she heard in the music through gesture. She did a fine job, and seemed to be having a great time.
When "The Trio" came on, a different interpreter came to the corner of the stage. This person seemed baffled by the avant-garde music that this group of musicians played. Eventually the first interpreter came back to the stage, and tried her best to translate electronic sounds and extended instrumental techniques, set in a format that lacked both regular meter and harmony, into sign language.

Some of the sounds these musicians made during their 50-minute set are very difficult to describe by using words. I didn't see the interpreter use signs other than signs showing which instrument was playing to describe what was happening in the music (and there was a lot happening in the music), and use facial expressions to transmit some of the emotional expression. The musicians themselves were improvising in such a free way that it was difficult to figure out where phrases were going before they got "there" (and they stood remarkably still on stage: this was a concert, not a "show"). The addition of sampled sounds (including train sounds and nature sounds) from Lewis' laptop added a great deal to the texture, and it sometimes took a while to figure out exactly which sounds were made by the instruments and which sounds were made by the laptop.

I thought she did an admirable job, and seeing her there started me on a train of thought (yes, my mind did wander once in a while during the performance). I began thinking about the ultimate value that a savvy interpreter could add to the experience of the ASL-informed members of an audience for new music, both hearing and non-hearing. S/he could give verbal descriptions of the contours and textures in the music, much the way a film voice-over script gives aural commentary on the visual happenings in a film for people who are unable to see.

It is difficult to do with improvised music. The interpreter must be quick with his or her commentary, but with music that s/he could study beforehand, and relate a commentary in real time, an interpreter could add something quite special and useful. It could even work for avant-garde music from earlier times, like Haydn and Beethoven!

And he can also dance . . .

. . . and the piano can too!