John Simon on Nostalgia

I have been a long time reader of John Simon, and have admired his criticism for a long time, even when I don't agree with his views. Perhaps I admire him most when I don't agree with his views. It was intriguing to read his take on the film The Artist . He actually found the film "disgraceful," and dismissed it as a silly piece of nostalgia that is inferior in every way to the films it emulates. He doesn't like the fact that the film is in black and white, and he doesn't like the use of Herrmann's love theme Vertigo in the film.

It made me wonder if it's a generational thing. After all, if I want to see a great silent film, I could see Wings, that is if it EVER makes it to the top of our Netflix cue, where we have been waiting for it for well over a year. When people make nostalgic films about the 1970s, the decade when I came "of age," I always find false notes. The fashions of the 1970s were horrible. The fabrics were itchy, nobody understood how to make pants that could fit women's bodies, too many people took drugs, there was too much litter, and the air smelled horrible because of the lead in gasoline. The cars, for the most part, were ugly too. And the hair styles. There was terrible racism and terrible sexism. There was also terrible pretension in art and music. And in film, too.

The nostalgia for people who were coming of age during the 1970s was the culture of the 1950s, mostly as depicted by the television show Happy Days. I remember asking my aunt if it was fun growing up during the 1950s. She told me that it was very boring.

I can accept Simon's dismissal, and could add a criticism or two of my own to his list, but I fear that his fortissimo dislike of the film might have drowned out some of the film's special qualities.

I thought that the use of sound in the film was brilliant, particularly during the dream sequence. I thought that the film was a deliberate comic fantasy, just like most of Hazanavicius' other films (which Simon hasn't seen, but perhaps might enjoy). There is a fine line between nostalgia and parody, and I think Hazanavicius, his actors, his crew, and his properties people walk it gracefully. Hazanavacious evokes Herrmann in another film (one of his OSS-117 movies), and it is also quite appropriate. Herrmann represents a generation of excellent American or naturalized American composers who worked in the film industry and brought the quality of American music up to a world-class standard. One silent message (of this silent movie) is how important well-thought-out and well performed music is for the success of a film.

The musicians' union protested the use of recorded music in films because it would put musicians out of work (and it did, for the most part), but the Hollywood studios also set the standard for recorded film music to become an art form in itself. I believe that is one reason why Hazanavacious used the Vertigo music in this particular film that concerns this particular subject. We have no idea what the music played in theaters sounded like in America during the 1920s and how much or how little it did to enhance the films the musicians accompanied. We can imagine it to have been great, or, in some cases, and in some cities, and in some theaters, it could have been dreadful. It probably sounded better in Russia.

Most of all I'm sorry that Simon missed what I found to be the most poignant film reference of all: homage to the character of Flike in De Sica's 1951 film Umberto D..

More Seymour Barab on YouTube!

This part of his Suite for Trumpet, Alto Saxophone, and Piano.

Emanuel Vardi's 1981 Viola Recital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Many thanks to Bernie Zaslav for sending this link of Emanuel Vardi in what surely must have been his prime! The piece at the 42:56 mark is Seymour Barab's 2nd Viola Sonata. A person could learn a whole lot about viola playing (and string playing in general) from watching and listening to this guy play.

Seeing the world through a window rather than through mirror

"I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you."

Bill Withers

Until 90 minutes ago I had no idea who Bill Withers was. Michael got a documentary about him called Still Bill from Netflix, and I found it an unexpected treat to get to know the man who wrote so many of the songs that served as the unconscious audio backdrop of my youth (I never knew who wrote them or who was singing because I never "watched" music on television). Withers, who is now in his 70s, demonstrates in the most beautiful way what it is to be friend, what it is to be a father, what it is to be a mentor, and what it means to connect with people person to person and not "personage" to personage. He also defines in practice what it means to have musical talent, and what it means to live through music (as shown through an awe-inspiring recording session he has with Raúl Midón). I supposed you could say that it isn't the "kind" of music I spend my life doing, but it is a "way" of music that I admire greatly.

I feel very fortunate to have had the chance, through this film, to spend bit of time with Bill Withers.

1930s AF of M Campaign Against Canned Music in Theatres

The folks at Paleofuture have a very interesting post about using recorded music in movie theaters.

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition

Now here's a nifty idea! I'm excited to hear these audition videos and to see the way people respond to them. The restrictions and rules of the competition tell us a great deal about the musical world at large, including public domain issues (like circumstances surrounding the Strauss Horn Concerto). A close reading of the rules is an interesting experience. It seems that the people running this competition have made every allowance for this to be a fair competition. Here are the rules, and here is a video about the project.

My Father playing Dohnanyi on YouTube!

I just happened to find this video from a concert my father played somewhere in Rhode Island back in May. At 81 he still sounds great! I just thought I'd share it here!

Downshifting Made Easier

One of the most eye-opening and ear-opening things I learned from using my new dual-mirror method of practicing is the observation that I have a tendency to move my bow slightly away from the bridge (towards the fingerboard) when I downshift. This causes a bit of instability, which translates into a less-than-consistent sound.

My solution? Move the bow ever-so slightly towards the bridge during every downward shift.

The results are remarkable! Give it a try if you notice this tendency in your downshifting.

Seven Years!

Gosh. It's been seven years since I started this blog on February 7, 2005. How could that be?

I can hear it now . . .

I imagine that my students will ask me tomorrow if I noticed that the Super Bowl ads used classical music.

I am not a sports person, and I also know next to nothing about the game of football, but I did watch a bit of the Super Bowl yesterday, and I did shudder a little when I heard snippets from the Scherzo from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in an ad that had polar bears drinking coke. I groaned an "Oy." Then another polar bear ad used a rendered excerpt from the last movement. There was Rossini in the Doritos, and Strauss in the Camry. Every excerpt except the Glass (which does work well as background music for a commercial) was extremely familiar; the "stock" of ringtone-friendly themes. (I suppose we should give creative points to Coke for not using the first movement of the Fifth).

Excuse my curmudgeonly blurt.

These commercials use themes from pieces of music, not pieces in their entirety. It is kind of like suggesting that a line from a movie IS the movie, or, by extension, "the movies."

Don't get me started on the half-time show, or the apocalypse theme that seemed to permeate the commercials. Or the product placement of Twinkies in the end-of-the-world ad for some kind of car that was not a Ford.

Recently Updated: The Real Bambino

After seeing OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies last night, I was able to trace the origins of the song sung by Jean Dujardin, the star of The Artist. You can teleport to the updated post here.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

For the longest time I practiced with these two mirrors on adjacent walls, but it wasn't until I actually hung up the mirror on the right (rendering it useless for anything but practicing), and turned my chair and stand at an angle so that I can see both images without the music stand getting in the way (why did it take me so long to figure this out?), I never reaped the huge benefits of being able to see what is happening on both sides of the instrument (in real time) while I am practicing.


One of the benefits of teaching is seeing the incredible difference it makes to the sound when something a student does looks right (a hand position, a bow hold, the place of the bow on the string, the direction and speed of the bow stroke). This configuration allows me to see the right side of my instrument when I am in upper positions (in the left mirror my hand is always in the way), see my vibrato, watch my shifts, notice when a lower string is being pulled rather than being cleanly stopped, see bow changes, and see the lapses from "ideal" that I miss every so often. Much more often, it seems, than I had imagined. It helps me to be a better teacher to myself.

Here is the operative geometry: both mirrors are a the height where I can see my whole playing mechanism while sitting down, which is what works for my particular corner because of the windows. The larger mirror is on the right, and it is 23" wide (minus the frame). The smaller mirror on the left has 19.5" of mirror (minus the frame). The distance from the corner of the room to the 2.5" frame of the right mirror is 28.5", and the distance from the corner to the 2" frame of the left mirror is 45.5 inches.

Here's a drawing of the missing violist (made by our son Ben during a concert I played in February of 1999). He was nine at the time. I was 39.

Ira Glass Interviews His Cousin Philip

This interview on today's Fresh Air (it was actually recorded in 1999) threw me for a loop. Here's a section where Philip Glass (who celebrates his 75th birthday today) talks about studying with Nadia Boulanger:

GLASS: You know, I find, I tell you, I'd finally after I'd been there about two years I finally figured out why I was there. We were having a lesson and I had come in with my harmony. We came to a place in the music and she said, it's wrong here. And I said, Madame Boulanger, it's correct. I cited the rules of voice leading and said that all these things are correct and there's nothing wrong with this. And she said yes, she said, but if Mozart had done it he would have done it like this. And she plays it the correct version, which was that perhaps the soprano was in the - the third was in the soprano instead of the root of the chord was in - whatever I had done I'd done it wrong. And I looked at her and I said but look, the rules are right here. And she said yes, but it's still wrong. I was astonished. And I - it was at that moment that I understood what she was teaching me. I realized that she was teaching the relationship between technique and style.

For example, now let's put the question another way. If you listen to let's say a measure of Rachmaninoff and then a measure of Bach, you know which is which without, you know immediately. And the question is well, why do you know that? They both are following basically the same rules of harmonic, of voice leading. But what happens is that you have in your, the course of your listening, you have taught yourself - you've recognized that Rachmaninoff will always solve a certain problem in a certain way. You may not say that to yourself, but your ear will tell you that. And that Bach will do it in his way. And you say, oh, that sounds like Bach or that sounds like Rachmaninoff or that sounds like Stravinsky. And what you're hearing is let's put it this way: You're hearing the predilection of the composer to resolve a technical problem in a highly personal way.

So in other words, now let's...

GLASS: And from that point, how hard is it to design your own personal way to solve it?

GLASS: Well, this is the point. The point is - and this is the other thing which she didn't say in words that day, but which I understood totally, was that in order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique.

You have to have a place to make the choices from.

GLASS: Yeah.

GLASS: If you don't have a basis on which to make to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all, you have a series of accidents.

GLASS: Looking at your career from the outside, one of the things that's striking is the number of different collaborators that you've worked with and I wonder if part of it is because you had the seminal experience of confronting somebody else's work.

GLASS: Well, that's exactly - that's exactly what happens when you find your place, yourself in a place of total ignorance of that kind. And that's the place where you can begin again, you can begin learning again. You know, the difficulty with any - well, it's not just artists or musicians but with anybody in any ordinary part of life - walk of life - the difficulty we have is how we continue to learn.

I mean, this is - everybody has this problem. Because you get what we call our training and education to a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing gears in the same way. And the biggest - this is particularly true of composers, they pick up a style or way of working a certain way, but the real issue, I've always said to younger composers, it's not how do you find your voice but how to get rid of it.

Getting the voice isn't hard, it's getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you've got the voice then you're kind of stuck with it.

GLASS: You've said to Terry Gross - in fact, she's asked you - do you ever try to compose so it doesn't sound like Philip Glass?

GLASS: I do it all the time and I fail all the time.

You can listen to the interview (or read a transcript of it) here.

Dancing about Architecture

There is a bit of tizz concerning Jonathan Biss's piece in the Guardian concerning how difficult it is to write about music. Biss's article is difficult to read, and I imagine that is E-Book about Beethoven is equally difficult to read. It is probably as difficult to read as it was for him to write.

The problem with writing about music is that our relationships change with pieces of music as we grow and change. A piece of music is not a static thing. In order to live it must be interpreted, and that interpretation, if it is successful, grabs our attention and inspires us to follow new ways of hearing a piece of music. It is difficult to hold onto a feeling, and it is difficult to name it adequately. Casting the "feel" of a moment is very hard to do in retrospect, because that feeling immediately becomes only a memory of a feeling.

Writing music can have the same issues. A phrase comes into your head. You write it down, struggling to make sure that all the rhythms are just as you thought of it. Later you play the phrase on the piano, and it's totally unremarkable. Then you try it on another instrument or in another register, and it sounds better. You bat it around, change it, give it harmony (change that harmony), and write it down anew. Perhaps it is something worth keeping, so you stash it away somewhere and hope that you can use it.

For some people this is a kind of torture. Other people find it fun. I find it fun. I also find it fun to write about music. I would rather write about music than just about anything. I find that the best way to really learn something about a piece of music is through writing about it. (I also find that the best way to understand a poem is by setting it to music.) It doesn't matter if an observation is "right" or "wrong," and it doesn't matter if by learning something new I invalidate a hunch I had before. I enjoy correcting myself. In my world being "right" is not the only way to interpret a piece of music.

I am in the fortunate position of not being an authority figure, and of not having anything to protect. I go with my carefully-thought-out hunches and take all sorts of risks by voicing ideas that I know nobody has thought of before (or at least written about) to my students, friends, and colleagues (and driving my family crazy). I do it when I write program notes, I do it when I write reviews, and I do it when I write blog posts. I don't have to worry about protecting my "image" in the musical world. I do not have an important position or a solo career. What you see is what you get with the music I write (there are no secrets except for the vast mysteries of music itself), and I take it upon myself to be honest when I write reviews.

When I was Jonathan Biss's age (he's 32) I was a very different person from the person I am today. I worked at a radio station, and had what some would consider an encyclopedic knowledge of music from all the liner notes I had read, but I had only really experienced music from the standpoint of a wind player who always played the upper voice in an ensemble. I mainly listened from the top down, and managed to miss a huge amount when I listened to music. I was an avid reader of reviews, but I had never written one. I knew a lot about baroque music and 20th-century music, but didn't really know much about classical forms because studying them had little to do with the music I played (the flute repertoire). In other words, I thought I knew something, but I really knew very little.

My real education began when I became a string player. Then everything changed. Now I hear everything differently, and I think very differently about everything I play. Every experience is a new experience.

Perhaps Jonathan Biss will, at some point, have the opportunity to step outside his position in the musical world, and maybe then it might be easier for him to write about music. If he still wants to.

Jean Dujardin (the silent star of The Artist) Sings

Yesterday Michael and I saw The Artist. I can't recommend a better way of spending an afternoon or an evening. It is a particularly moving experience to see it in a theater. Don't wait until it comes out in DVD, unless you have to.

While looking around the internets for stuff about Ludovic Bource, the film's composer, I found this nifty clip from OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, which is another collaboration (2006) between Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicius, Bérénice Bejo, and the composer Ludovic Bource. Sure, the instrumental playing is faked, but the spirit is wonderful.

UPDATE: I saw OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies last night, and learned that the music for the above link was not by Bource! It is an Arabic version of "Bambino," a Neopolitan song that was made popular in France in 1956 by the pop singer Dalida:



The original Neopolitan song, called "Guaglione" doesn't have the words "bambino." It was written by Giuseppe Fanciulli (the pseudonym of Mastro Sapone, who lived from 1881-1951), with words by Nicola "Nisa" Salerno.


* * * * * * * * *

Here's the trailer for The Artist:

Apollo the Violist!

Is that a viola I see strapped to Apollo's belt?
[from this post on Bibliodyessey]

Grocery, Grocer-ah, Grocery, Grocer-ha ha ha ha ha ha

It might be difficult for readers of this blog to understand exactly the kind of town I live in. Our kids used to describe it to their college friends and urban colleagues, and the usual response was disbelief, because there is so little to do here. It is no longer the cozy and somewhat vibrant town we moved to around 25 years ago, and from tales I have enjoyed from our plumber (one of my favorite people in town), it is not the same town it was when he was growing up.

Our town used to have a courthouse square as its hub, and a small university a mile down the road from the square. The square is situated at the highest point in town, just a little south of the railroad tracks, and it used to be the epicenter of local activity. It had all kinds of shoe, clothes, and food stores, a department store, a hardware store, a drugstore with a soda fountain, car dealerships, and restaurants. According to Rick (the plumber) there was nothing that you could even imagine needing that you couldn't buy on the square. It was a bustling center of commercial activity, particularly on weekends and evenings.

When we moved to town the square was still a little vibrant, but the vibrations were dissipating. There is still some commercial activity on the square. There's a shoe repair shop that repairs zippers for $3.00 (cash), and a great health food store where the proprietor knows all her customers by name and nutritional need, but most of the square is now dedicated to nostalgia and "antique" stores.

Over the past 25 years stores a bit closer to the university have claimed most of the local day-to-day business, and many stores that flourished on the square back in the day re-located to a west-side strip mall that was near the town's three grocery stores.

A grocery store know as "Eisner's" predated us. By the time we got here it had been bought by Jewel, but local people still called it "Eisner's." Jewel was then taken over by the IGA, which was formerly located down the street a bit (Michael likes to quote me as saying that they even moved the cigarette butts to the new location). Across the street was Wilb Walker, another local grocer that was in direct and friendly competition with Eisner back in the day. Wilb's (we called it Wilb's, but some people called it Walker's) was the cheaper store. Ten years ago we got a "Super Walmart," (one with groceries) a mile or two down the road to the east, and Jewel closed its doors. Wilb's remained the only west-side grocery store.

When Wilb's was taken over by County Market, we still called it Wilb's. The same people worked there, and it still looked pretty much the same. The prices were a bit higher, but socially-responsible people shopped there because it wasn't Walmart. I would still see "socially-responsible" people at Walmart though.

The big buzz in town last spring was that County Market was getting a new building. This meant that Wilb's would be torn down. Wilb's was cold, and it was kind of dreary. It was also kind of limited compared to the supermarkets that Michael and I visit when we go out of town. The new prefabricated building, complete with a vast parking lot and a second story coffee area, went up really quickly, and the grand opening was scheduled for Tuesday at 5:00.

Michael and I had the evening free, so we decided to go and see the store. We didn't go at "Grand Opening" time, but we went a bit later in the evening. We did hear that people were lined up outside. A local first.

The vast parking lots were full, and we barely found a parking space. I have never seen so many people in cars turn out for a local event that didn't have something to do with sports or country music. The place was packed, and to add a bit of the surreal to the situation, there was live music. The uncle of a harpist from another town manages the store, so he asked her to play for the opening. It added a certain panache to the occasion. Surreal panache. When have you ever seen (or heard) a harpist in a grocery store?

The people I saw in the "organic" area ("I'm not here to buy anything, I'm just looking around") agreed that the prices were higher than the prices at the health food store on the square. They would have been in the old County Market as well. That brief moment of having the harp-charged air filled with eager people who had just entered the store's produce area (and it is a nice looking produce area, complete with a tractor) was rather exciting. On top of all the excitement were free gifts: the choice of a free plastic lemon juicer or a plastic zester. And they were giving away ballpoint pens too.

The harpist stopped playing about 15 minutes after we arrived, and the muzak and white noise took its place. Then it became just a store.

Marion Bauer, Guest Blogger

Marion Bauer (1882-1955) is no longer alive, but her music (when I am not practicing it) lives in my head. The more I practice and rehearse her Viola Sonata, the more I admire her as a composer.

She was once an important force in New York musical circles as both a composer and a teacher of all musical subjects, before she was relegated to the margins of music history by luminaries like Virgil Thomson. In the 1980s he said that she was not any part of a modern movement, and that she should not be grouped with Boulanger or Copland, and that was that. He obviously didn't know that Bauer was Nadia Boulanger's first American student and that Copland's success in New York had a lot to do with Bauer's influence.

The following excerpt from the first pages (4-5) of her book, Twentieth Century Music: How it Developed--How to Listen to it, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1933 (and hailed as "the first important contribution to new music" by the New York Sun) has particular resonance for me.

Most listeners, regarding present-day music as harmful to the continuance of a traditional lineage, dismiss it as the work of fanatics. By avoiding the discomfort of exploring unknown territory, they do not retard progress but only their individual development. the race of the swift and the battle of the strong continue, but they are out of the running and blame modern conditions instead of their own intolerance and short-sightedness.

We have experienced unbelievable development in radio, aeronautics, architecture, painting, and scientific research. Why should we not expect music to follow in the footsteps of its fellow-arts and of invention? It is the usual story of the vision of the few, which is gradually tolerated, then generally accepted, and finally superseded by a new vision. the natural procedure is from the know to the unknown, and the right of way to the New is contested at every step. Opposition to innovation has made history.

We never profit by the experiences of the past. We do not seem to realize that we repeat what other ages have gone through, and never seem to understand the secrets the past would reveal. We are not inventors and innovators but merely pawns used by a force which is a composite of the accumulated needs, beliefs, desires, ambitions, inspirations, and inhibitions of each age. This gigantic force is the cause behind the ever-changing effects. Religion, politics, economics, social conditions, art, all act and react upon each other in response to this "spirit of the age," and in turn help to create it.

. . .

No matter how beautiful, how satisfactory, or how scientific the art of a period may be, we know that it encloses seeds of its fruition, and, at the same time, of its destruction. At the height of perfection, decay begins. The spirit of beauty caught in a net, subjected to a microscope, and preserved in alcohol becomes a museum specimen. Nor can art flourish in the strait-jacket of standardization. And so we see throughout the centuries three inevitable stages in every art epoch: youth, maturity, and decay. The fact that epochs overlap creates friction. The New is seldom welcome; it breeds alarm and distrust. In time it proves its right to a place in the sun, becomes overconfident and arrogant, and, finally, after a life or death struggle, is supplanted by an upstart, a usurper. And the cycle begins again!

Slow Practice

My father used to always practice music slowly. It was always a great comfort to hear him practice when I was a kid (perhaps my greatest comfort) because everything always sounded so beautiful. It didn't matter what he was practicing (perhaps therein lies my fondness for scales and etudes) and it didn't matter whether it was tonal or not.

12-tone music was the new music of choice in the 1960s and early 1970s, and I still feel kind of goofy when I tell people about the comfort it brings me to hear Schoenberg played well. I also feel a little goofy telling people how much I enjoy practicing the viola slowly. I guess that slow practice is one way to make sure that all the string crossings and shifts that you need to do, and all the pitches that you need to hear find their eventual path of least resistance. It may be "making slow progress," but in the long run slow practice accomplishes the ultimate task of playing well (when it really matters) far quicker than any other kind of practice.

I distinctly remember one week in the summer when my father was practicing a slow passage that I could not get out of my head. I also couldn't identify it. I sang it to every violist and every string player I could find (and at Tanglewood there were many), and nobody could tell me what it was.

Here it is.

I later heard it in context. The passage below comes at the 19-second mark.



One of these days the piece will fall into the public domain, and I'll be able to give you more than this image from an article by Milton Babbitt about certain remarkable measures from the Schoenberg String Trio, Opus 45. I guess this bit stuck in Babbitt's imagination as well, huh?

Street Signs: Spoils from My Walk

Complete Works of Purcell

It's so difficult to decide on which pieces to link to because they are all so wonderful. I can't tell you how long I have waited for a catalog like this. All the Purcell works have score images from the first printed editions, and are all given excellent performances. Listen to this part song in praise of the Viol, and then bookmark this portal to the whole channel.

If you just want to graze a bit, listen to Pox on You, Young John the Gardner, If Music be the Food of Love, and There's Nothing so Fatal as Women

From a 1913-1914 Boston Symphony Program

How many composers in this ad are women? I count four. My latest challenge/project/obsession is Marion Bauer's EXCELLENT sonata for viola and piano. It's only been recorded once, but it is in print and available (though not in the Petrucci Library).

Medical Marijuana and the Cold-Hearted Candidate

This is the man I remember from my days at Bain.

Mike Daisey on This American Life

After you spend 39 minutes listening to Act 1 of this episode of This American Life you may be as boggled as I am, particularly if you listen to it through any sort of electronic device (and there is no other way).

If you live in New York or happen to visit New York during the next few months, you can hear Mike Daisey's whole monologue "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" (the piece on This American Life is an "edit" from the 2-hour show) without having huge pangs of first world guilt.

Reconsidering Norman Lebrecht

Over the years, and in these pages, I have been critical of Norman Lebrecht, but after listening to his interview with Thomas Quasthoff, I have a fresh opinion of him. The interview is mostly Quasthoff, but Lebrecht seems to have helped him feel comfortable enough to be honest and forthcoming about all sorts of very personal subjects. That is a talent in itself. I look forward to hearing the rest of Lebrecht's BBC interviews.

I think that bloggery is better for Lebrecht's purposes than bookery (though I haven't read his fiction), and he seems to be very successful in engaging people in dialogue concerning the ever-changing (and clearly not dying) world of music.

The sad news that led me to write this post (which I read on Slipped Disc), is that Quasthoff is retiring from performing. He's only 52 (my age), and he's retiring for health reasons. The interview clearly shows that he is far more than "just a voice" or even "just a musician." He is a person of serious substance and serious intellect.

Happy Birthday, Seymour!

My dear friend Seymour Barab is 91 today. I have written about him and his wonderfully witty and beautiful music quite a bit over the years. I'm taking the occasion of his birthday to let you know about a brand new recording of his charming 1995 setting of Norman Rockwell's story "Willie Was Different" for flute, clarinet, piano, and narrator that was made by the trio@play.

Bird lovers take note!

James Dean and Opus 111

From an obituary in the New York Times:

Earlier in life Mr. Hirshbein had taken up auto racing, as a consequence of his friendship with James Dean, a racing enthusiast. The two had met when Dean was an unknown young actor.

Dean was sitting on Mr. Hirshbein’s doorstep one day listening to him practice while waiting for a neighbor to return. When Jessica Hirshbein invited him in, Dean asked Mr. Hirshbein whether he could play Beethoven’s Opus 111 Sonata.

“That piece really swings,” Ms. Hirshbein recalled Dean saying. “ I love those syncopations."

After Dean was killed in an automobile crash in 1955, Mr. Hirshbein gave up auto racing at his wife’s insistence.

Who knew?

I imagine the syncopations Dean liked are the ones that begin at 3:33 and really start to swing at 5:13 in this recording by Wilhelm Kempff, one of the rare recordings on YouTube that has the whole movement!



What a treat it has been to graze through the Opus 111 offerings there.

Practice Mute Point

Actually, this is a practice mute tip, but I couldn't resist the pun.

I like to play with recordings, and I particularly like to play with recordings when I'm learning a new piece and I want to be able to hear and feel how my part interacts with the other part or parts. Sometimes I do it by loading music into my iPod and playing while wearing headphones, which works pretty well as long as the headphone cords remain behind my head, and sometimes I use speakers, which works pretty well as long as I'm playing violin. The viola is louder under my ear than the violin, so it is difficult to hear the sound of the recording unless I crank it up to an inappropriately high volume.

After a bit if frustration this morning, I tried using my practice mute to play along with a recording. It was a great success! The practice mute allows me to keep a recording at a realistic volume, allows me to physically "dig in" to the instrument and be as expressive as I like, and it lets me hear the sound of the violist I happen to be playing with (who is often playing well and nicely in tune) as well as the other musicians on the recording.

I take no credit for this . . .

. . . but I had to share it!


[Click on the picture to make it bigger.]

Composer's Datebook

I tend to let the Composers Datebook podcasts pile up for a while on my iPod (each one is only a couple of minutes long), and then I listen to a bunch of them. I always learn something.

The composers presented on Composers Datebook are all excellent composers, but listening to the podcasts end to end can be terribly intimidating, particularly when the American Composers Forum discusses current successful composers (and there are some that seem to come up repeatedly). I know that I lack many of the commerce- and commodity-related skills a person has to have in order to be a successful composer, and for most of my writing "career" I have measured success in terms of how pieces I write sound, and if they are vehicles for people to express themselves. I'm not good at selling myself (even if I try), and am not very good at doing the kind of networking that is necessary to get pieces performed. I could even say that I believe that one of my strong points is not to be intimidating. But that means, in this dog-eat-dog world, that I am a good candidate to be on the receiving end of intimidation: to be intimidated.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps that podcast is geared more for consumers of music (i.e. people who don't write music themselves) than it is to composers.

Intimidation is different from inspiration. For me nothing inhibits creativity like intimidation.

The Rake's Progress

Michael and I were both excited to find this item about Igor Stravinsky. I was particularly excited because I once owned (and lost) a Stravigor. I spent many years searching for a replacement, which was very difficult because the name "Stravigor" wasn't printed on the device. Unfortunately Stravinsky was not as good an engineer as he was a composer. You can see that the lines in Arnold Newman's photos in the above link are uneven. The Noligraph is a better tool.

Both of these are versions of the Rastrum, which, as I learned from Sean, the keeper of the Blackwing Pages, comes from the Latin word for "rake.”

Half-Acre Whole Family

Here's a moment of family music. Rachel and Ben have flown back to their grown-up nests, but right before they left (literally) we made this video.



(No, we don't all play backwards! Ben's computer just recorded it as a mirror image.)

Vi Hart Mathomusician

I was delighted to come across this video explanation of the way overtones work on Mind the Gap.



Isn't it a treat to learn that the brilliant Vi Hart is a violist (though she doesn't admit to it in this interview, and she does treat her viola oddly by writing on it) and a composer? And look at the way she uses a music box to demonstrate the way a mobius strip works as a conduit for musical possibilities. Somehow, as a bona fide mathophobe, I feel optimistic living in a world with young people like Vi Hart opening up possibilities of how to think about things differently. Here's her YouTube channel, where I plan to spend a lot of time.

[Clearly, the apple hasn't fallen very far from the tree.]

Bravo!

Instruments for Political Figures

From Barack Obama's Interview with Barbara Walters

"If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I deeply regret not having learned a musical instrument. And I regret not having focused more on Spanish when I was studying it in school. I would love to be able to speak Spanish fluently and play an instrument."

What instrument do you think Barack Obama would have played well? My guess would be that a polyphonic instrument like the piano would work well for him. And he would probably make a good chamber music pianist. (There's always time to learn as an adult, Mr. President, though I know that it might have to wait until after your second term.)

People who have chosen instruments successfully (or have had them successfully chosen for them) tend to develop personalities that correspond to the way those instruments behave in performance situations, collective or otherwise. What instrument would you assign to which prominent "in the news" political figure (even political players who are no longer in the headlines and/or no longer running for office).

[Our son Ben, who found this interview on line and shared it with me, suggested at breakfast that a good instrument for Ron Paul would be the Erhu.]

Musical Nature Ramble

I have been doing some reading lately. One of the most eye-opening books I have enjoyed is The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. I decided to get the book on a whim when I heard Greenblatt describe it during coverage of the National Book Awards somewhere on television. I thought it would be a good idea to actually know something about Renaissance thought since I spend a lot of time thinking about and playing Medieval and Renaissance music. I always wondered how the people who contributed to the Carmina Burana (or at least some of them), for example, knew about Greek and Roman mythology. But this post is not about my ignorance. That would take up too much space, and would not be very interesting to read.

The Swerve, if you haven't clicked on the above link, is about the circumstances concerning the discovery of a book-length poem called De Rerum Natura by Titus Lucretius Carus. Now I have a copy of Rolfe Humphries' translation of the poem (thanks, Michael), and I find it beautiful and fascinating. I have finished the first book, which makes the case for Epicurus' idea that nothing comes from nothing, that all things are made from atoms that float around in space. The racy parts of the poem (I have peeked ahead) seem to make it clear that the concept of Venus (though not the goddess herself) is what encourages all of nature to continue to be. Some essential components of Lucretius' argument that many people would object to this "holiday season" are his loud and constant claim that there is no life after death, and his claim that there is no entity that watches humanity and causes things to happen.

Lucretius was, of course, reacting against what many modern people would consider mythology: the polytheism of the Ancient Greeks, and probably the polytheism of the Ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, and other mythologies that might not have survived. But his arguments work just as well to counter the various beliefs and mythologies that people have in the modern world.

Reading the poem helps me to understand that poetry and music are all part of nature. It is comforting to know that what we do as musicians is not "extra" as many members of modern society seem to believe. It also makes a case for the imagination. Anyone who has enjoyed fiction, either as a writer or as a reader, knows that when we create characters or empathize with characters created by other people, we do it with emotions that feel real to us. Some of us care about characters in books and operas with the same kinds of feelings we have for people we know in our non-reading lives. It is one of the reasons we read fiction, and one of the reasons some of us write it (I make up stories, but I have never actually written fiction, per se). Most of us are guilty of believing things that are fictitious about people who are real, and some of us are guilty of making up stuff about people that may not be true. We also sometimes try to believe things that other people believe, and sometimes we try to have faith in something intangible, and attribute "results" to that faith.

I have faith: I belive in atoms, I believe in gravity, I believe in the usefulness of the scientific method, I believe in practice, I believe in instinct, and I believe that each person has his or her own human nature that really can't be altered. I believe in tonality, but I do not believe it's the only way to organize music. I believe in the necessity of musical instinct in the creative act of writing music, and I believe in musical instinct when it comes to interpreting music and playing music with other people. I used to believe in the seasons, but things have changed in our world, and I can no longer trust the seasons. I do believe that as long as the carbon that is inside the planet stays there, nature will find a new balance.

I believe in the continued relevance of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms (and a whole slew of other wonderful composers who believed in Christian theology), regardless of where they believed their inspiration came from. It's the music that matters.

Polymusic, Polyculture, and Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day

The more tools I have to look out into the world, the more I begin to understand that there is nothing about modern life that suggests anything like the "common practice" monoculture or set of monocultures that existed in the West before the days of mass communication. There are people who explore a different internet from the one I explore; and there are people who watch a different set of television channels, see different movies from the ones I watch, and read different books from the ones I read. There are people who eat totally different food from the food I eat, and English-speaking people who use entirely different groups of words to transmit reflections on the the world that I understand we share.

I am therefore not surprised when the responses that I get from my Community College students to a question on their final exam that asks them to list the pieces they liked most and least during the semester are all over the map. Some prefer the pieces that they heard later in the semester (when they finally figured out that they like listening to what we call "classical" music), and some chose music from very early on in the semester--music from the Middle Ages--as their favorite music. Some students really love opera, and some students really hate it. Some people slept through classes, and some people who slept early in the semester stopped sleeping and started paying attention. Some students respond to Wagner, and some respond to Stravinsky. Most people tend to like Mozart (what's not to like?), but some do not respond to Beethoven. Many students have an open mind when it comes to 20th and 21st-century music because they have heard serial music in horror movies and on "The Twilight Zone," and they have heard minimalism in movies and commercials. Some people are comfortable with electronically-generated sounds, and some people find Berlioz too wierd, too dissonant, and too chaotic.

There is no rhyme or reason to the choices students make when it comes to the 500 or so years of "classical music" we study. It all has to do with people's individual personalities. I think about how far we have come as a society when our young adults have the opportunity to make so many personal choices when it comes to music. When I think of my place in the world as a person who might open up doors to the wonders of the senses to unsuspecting people, both in class and in places where I play concerts (not to mention the people who happen by things I have written on this blog), makes me feel proud to be who I am and to do what I do.

Outer Life: Empty Middle Seat

I read this post several times this morning, and thought I would share this fine bit of bloggery.

Randolph Hokanson's With Head to the Music Bent: A Musician's Story

Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi introduced me to this book through a blog post, and I am sincerely grateful to have had the opportunity to read it. Not being from the American West Coast, I hadn't heard of Randolph Hokanson when I was growing up, but I certainly knew of two of his closest friends and teachers: Dame Myra Hess and Howard Ferguson.

I first encountered Ferguson's music a few months ago on a recording from a concert Hess played with violinist Isaac Stern on August 28, 1960 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh that was just issued by Testament (I just noticed that one of the quotes from reviewers on the website for this recording is from me!), and was overwhelmed by everything about the performance.

Hokanson had the great fortune to leave the state of Washington in 1936 (when he was 20), and become immersed in and embraced by the world of England's musical and literary intelligentsia (he met G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells at the same party). In this memoir he chronicles the highlights of his musical education, giving specific (and extraordinarily useful and insightful) examples from Myra Hess and Wilhelm Kempff about the what, how, and why of music.

He manages to condense 70 years of experience into less than 200 pages, and along the way he describes some of the artistic and geographical wonders of Europe, his impressions of what Germany felt like right before WWII (he attended a Furtwangler performance where Hitler was in the audience, surrounded by flags), and what it was like to tour for "Columbia Concerts," an organization that sent New York musicians (Hokanson was living in New York during the 1940s) on long trips to far away places to play concerts for very little take-home pay. Hokanson gives the rollicking details of one such concert in a place he calls "Nowhere," where a terribly out-of-tune piano was put on a "raked" stage (one that was sloped upwards towards the audience).

One of the photos (there are a few pages of photos) has Hokanson with his piano student Corey Cerovsek (who looks to be about nine years old). Now I understand one reason that Cerovsek's Beethoven Violin Sonatas are so spectacular.

Hokanson, who is now retired in Seattle, but is still paying, is a "music first" sort of person and an excellent writer. His memoir makes me long for the musical world of days gone by, when substance separated the competent from the committed, and accomplished musicians seemed to care more about their quest to understand the music they played than about the size and shape of their careers. But he makes it clear that the what, how, and why of music that will always matter, and that the quest to be come a "Beethoven player" is one that does take a lifetime, and one that makes a lifetime worthwhile.

The book is a print-on-demand book that is available through the University Bookstore in Seattle (1.800.335.7323).

I found this wonderful recording of the first movement of the Mozart A minor Piano Sonata, K. 310 on line. The playing says everything.

[N.B. Here's a link to more recordings, and a link to still more!]

How the English Language was Developed

[Thanks, Carrie!]

Inadvertent YouTube Cagean Moment

Yesterday I had my last classes of the semester. My morning class, which covered later music from the later 20th and early 21st centuries went pretty well, despite the fact that I loaded up the browser of the windows classroom computer with 19 or 20 YouTube videos. I held my breath, and everything went as planned.

Feeling confident for my afternoon class, I loaded the browser (Firefox) with one or two more videos than I had used in the morning (I couldn't resist the the temptation to give examples of all three parts of Reich's Different Trains). When the first Messiaen piece played with an almost still video picture, I had a feeling that everything was doomed to fail. There is no silence as deep as the silence of a class watching a teacher wrestle with a computer. Even the silence of 4:33 doesn't compare. When the title for one piece and the silent and still picture for another were being displayed at the same time, I knew I was in serious trouble.

The silence was broken when I simply said "to hell with it" (to myself, of course), and decided to try to close the browser. Nothing happened. I tried various things in the task manager, but nothing happened. Then all the tabs began opening up, and layers of Carter, Babbitt, Messiaen, Seeger, Glass, Cage, Dun, and Reich started entering like Renaissance points of imitation.

I had to identify which was which (which was surprisingly easy because each of these pieces is surprisingly different from the others), but the tabs wouldn't close. When the Mad King in Davies' "Eight Songs for a Mad King" started screaming, I had to laugh. When the loops of Cage's Microtonal Ragas came to the foreground, I explained to the class that we were having a true Cagean moment. The only problem is that I didn't have the chance to explain Cage to them before this happened (and I can never depend on students to do their reading), so I was alone in my appreciation of the chaos. The students were smiling only at my folly. I thought I was in the middle of a teaching nightmare.

I tried closing the browser again, and this time it seemed to actually close, but the music kept on playing. And playing. And playing.

I was, finally, able to get about 45 minutes of the 75-minute class in (gosh, this fiasco lasted for a half an hour!), and I think that the students might actually have learned something about later 20th century music.

Try it for yourself. Load up as many of these YouTube videos as you dare, and play them at the same time. The effect is truly remarkable.