Variations for Solo Viola d'amore

I wrote this piece for Yvain Delahousse, a terrific young French viola d'amore player. You can hear him play the beginning of it here. Yvain is planning to record a video of the whole piece soon, so you can find out what happens in the course of its four-minute life. I will post it when it is available.

This one-minute segment is the introduction. I think of it as introducing the "issue" at hand. A theme with variations will follow. The "issue" at hand can be any issue that any playing or anyone listening might be dealing with. Life, in all its complexity, is filled with one thing after another.

Writing this piece was excellent medicine for me. I wrote it during a personal struggle that I had to work my way through, and my path from a place of darkness to a place of light was made clearer as a result of bushwhacking a musical path using the viola d'amore as my means of locomotion.

The cover image is one that my mother painted. I don't know where the original might be, but its image gives me the sense of comfort that having tea with someone friendly and accepting (like my mother) can have. And I remember the lamp from childhood. You can find the music here now, and will be able to find it soon on this page of the IMSLP.

But what have you done for me lately?

"But what have you done for me lately?" was one of the key phrases that I remember from my childhood. My father used to say it in a mocking way, and I guess it might have been in reference to me, but it could have been in reference to something he had read or observed. It could have been in reference to something either of my brothers might have said. Nobody will ever know. My father isn't in any condition to remember this or any other of the memorable phrases he uttered half a century ago.

But the odd thing is that the feeling behind this particular phrase informs my experience as an adult in the twenty-first century. And it seems to permeate the kinds of relationships far too many of us have what we used to refer to as our virtual lives on social media.  These days it seems that "virtual" life and "real" life (life as it happens in analog time and without necessarily using mechanical means) are intermingled in such a way that they lack the separation they once had. 

Is a parent supposed to continue to be the source of all things a child might need? If not, when and how does it stop?

[I don't think it stops with death, because I often rely on what I have of my mother, which I experience through her artwork, for spiritual sustenance that I can connect to when I need to, regardless of what she gave me or didn't give me in childhood.]

I wonder if I am alone when  joyous moments in my life sometimes seem like they happened long ago in a place I no longer live (I have lived in the same town for nearly forty years). Even if it is I who did nice or generous things for others, memories of deeds or events seem to fade more quickly than they did in the days before we communicated mainly (it seems) through these rectangles that we hold in our hands or prop in front of us on desks and laps.

I admit that gifts I give through the computer, whether it is ordering things and having them mailed somewhere, or whether it is sharing a piece of music as a PDF, feel less "gifty" than when I hand someone a printed and bound copy of something I have written or an item that I can place in their hands (preferably wrapped).

Maybe this is all just a byproduct of getting older, and I suppose technology changes during every lifetime, if a person is fortunate enough to live a long life.

One saying my father used to utter, "It's easy when you know how," is something he might have learned from a teacher or colleague. Or it could have been something he made up himself. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a brilliant bit of truth that I have found works in all kinds of situations. When I mentioned the saying to my father last year, and told him that it has really meant a lot to me over the years, his response to the saying was, "Whatever that means."

Perhaps in advanced old age, the "country" my father now lives in, you can posess knowledge, but nothing is ever easy.

"In Key" Podcast Interview

A couple of months ago I did an interview for a music podcast, and it just went on line today. So I'm sharing it here.

Elly Ameling on YouTube!

Elly Ameling was my first favorite singer. And to hear her talk about music, particularly these settings by Debussy and Faure of Verlaine's "Cest l'extase langoureuse," thrills me and makes me cry. The way she reads the French, the way she translates it into English, and the way she sings.

When I find myself at loose ends I know where on YouTube I need to go. It is indeed "extase langoureuse" there.

Thank you for everything Elly Ameling! Thank you for introducing me to what can be accomplished musically through singing, thank you for introducing me to Paul Verlaine's poetry, and thank you for still being here for me and your other devoted fans.



Here's a link to her channel which, as of today, has seventy-one videos.

Mozart Serenade in C

When I looked at a photo of page of one of the parts (not in Mozart's hand) of this newly unearthed piece from Mozart's childhood, it looked far less spectacular than the pieces he wrote in his later teenage years. This performance makes it clear that the thirteen-year-old Mozart was a kid with serious talent and ability, who had a firm grasp on the musical idioms of the mid 18th century he was exposed to inside and outside of Salzburg.



The young Mozart spent much of his thirteenth year (and much of his childhood) traveling through Europe and being showcased, along with his sister, as a child prodigy. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's teacher had been, up to that time, his father. Leopold Mozart was certainly an excellent violin teacher, but he had only so much to teach about composition to a person of his son's musical calibre.

The Mozarts met Padre Martini in 1770, and it was through Wolfgang's study with a truly great teacher that he was able to develop his considerable talent into far more than considerable artistry.

I imagine that there are people who are kind of shocked to hear something mediocre coming from Mozart. We hold our musical gods to very high standards. It is my feeling that a lot of mediocre music by people who became great composers, like Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, served as kindling. That this little Serenade didn't make it into Mozart's catalog is no surprise to me.

Podcast

[Thanks to Michael for the title.}

Harris Walz III "The Great Debate"

This is a celebration of Kamala Harris's debate performance last week (it's hard to believe that the presidential debate was just one week ago).

You will be able to find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP soon.

Morning Thoughts about Beethoven

I have to say that I am enjoying my 66th year, particularly since I am learning so much more about life and about music than ever before.

I have been working on my piano skills for a while (if you call a while a couple of decades), but now that I can play well enough to actually listen to what I am playing, I find myself totally boggled by the genius of Beethoven, my current companion at the piano.

How is it that I missed so much when I was younger when I listened to recordings and performances of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas? How is it that I never noticed just how personally and effectively he writes for the piano. And how different it is from the way he writes for the violin, the viola, the cello, or stringed instruments in combination.

Beethoven's piano writing contains multitudes, and I am only beginning to be able to notice the surface. His Sonatas are little (or not so little) worlds that are designed to be inhabited and animated by a single human being. The geography is there, the roads are all mapped out and paved, the climate is set, and the progression through the day is layed out. But the drama that happens is a personal one that resides in the mind, heart, and musical experience of the pianist. And that drama can change, depending on the particular feelings and experiences of the person playing.

And if someone is listening, the listener's personal experience can illuminate a secondary drama. I like to believe that in a performing situation the inner images of a person listening can have a great impact on the inner images of a person playing. When there are more people playing or more people listening it is different.

I am actually glad that I have come to this understanding of Beethoven later in my life (and at an age he never reached) because otherwise I would have been too intimidated by what he can do with a given musical idiom, gesture, motive, melodic fragment, harmonic progression to ever consider writing music myself. That what I write and have written is inferior to Beethoven is a given, but how inferior astonishes me on a daily basis.

I understand a lot more about Brahms now, because I understand a lot more of what Brahms understood about Beethoven. I am forever grateful that Brahms took up the job of trying with all his might to keep the figurative fire lit, because of the tremendous music he wrote. And Schubert was able to speak directly to pianists with far more ability than I ever imagine I will have (I do have a volume of Schubert Sonatas, just in case).

Beethoven certainly wrote music for pure entertainment. I would put the overtures and many of the symphonies in this category. And there's nothing wrong with writing and using music for entertainment. Mozart did it extremely well. Haydn too. And Schubert. But I'm so fortunate to have lived long enough to be able to recognize expression that is personal, and intended for pianists to connect with the essence of music.

When music written long ago with great care reaches out from the page and resonates with the beating of my heart, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude.

Zero Gravity, Many Tears

When I first saw this image I wondered how it was even possible for a person to play violin in zero gravity. How do you keep the bow on the string?

But Sarah Gillis, armed with a specially-made violin, did. And the John Williams piece from Star Wars: The Force Awakens she played remotely (oh so remotely) with El Sistema students in Venezuala, the United States, Brazil, Sweden, Uganda, and Haiti brought real tears to my eyes in this linked performance recorded the other day and broadcast yesterday.

To Dorico's credit . . .

Slowly I am making my way through the various help screens in the Dorico "manual," and though it takes what seems like eons to figure out what commonplace things (like text boxes) are called, I am finding out a little about the logic of the program.

But to their credit, the engraved musical examples they show are often by composers who are female. So far I have encountered Josephine Lang and Dora Pejačević.

I have also learned that the obtuse nature of the program is a result of the developers, who were "let go" by Sibelius, having to create a program from scratch with names for items and names procedures that would not be identified as proprietary to Sibelius (or to Finale, for that matter).

So I will continue to figure out how to do things Doricolly.

Cumberland Gap: a lot of joy in the morning

And that is our son Ben singing and playing mandolin.

Rockabye

Michael and I have been enjoying watching films starring Constance Bennett over the past week or so. We were introduced to her through a featured collection of pre-code movies on the Criterion channel called "Rebels at the Typewriter," where the lead female characters are strong-minded, and the screenwriters were all female.

Last night we watched Rockabye, a movie from 1932 where Bennett plays Judy, an actress who came to be a great success as a result of her manager discovering her in one of the seedier parts of town.

I give no spoilers about the plot here.

What struck me about the character of Judy is that she seems to be an amalgam of four famous female opera characters who made unfortunate choices in the course of their operas: Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Juilette in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, Carmen, in Bizet's Carmen, and Floria Tosca in Puccini's Tosca.

At a central point of the film, Judy returns to one of the speakeasys she frequented (and sang songs in) before she was a famous Broadway star. A patron played by Sterling Holloway asks her repeatedly to sing the 1916 Raymond Hubbel/John L. Golden song "Poor Butterfly." Here's the text, which is a reflection on the story of Madama Butterfly.

There's a story told of a little Japaneses
Sitting demurely 'neath the cherry blossom trees.
Miss Butterfly her name.
A sweet little innocend child was she,
Till a fine young American from the sea.
To her garden came.
Then met 'neath the cherry blossoms ev'ry day
And he taught her how to love in the "merican way,
To love with her soul! 'twas easy to learn;
Then he sailed away with a promise to return.

REFRAIN:

Poor Butterfly! 'neat the blossoms waiting
Poor Butterfly! For she loved him so.
The moment pass into hours
The hours pass into years
And as she smiles through her tears,
She murmurs low,
The moon and I know that he be faithful,
I'm sure he come to me bye and bye.
But if he don't come back
Then I never sigh or cry
I just mus' die.

"Won't you tell my love" she would whisper to the breeze
Tell him I'm waiting 'neath the cherry blossom trees.
My Sailor man to see.
The bees and the humming birds say they guess,
Ev'ry day that passes makes one day less.
'Till you'll come home to me.
For once Butterfly she gives her heart away,
She can never love again
She is his for aye.
Through all of this world,
For Ages to come,
So her face just smiles,
Tho' her heart is growing numb.

(REFRAIN)

Judy doesn't sing "Poor Butterfly," but she does sing Harry von Tilzer's "Till the Right Man Comes Along." Perhaps "Poor Butterfly" would make the connection too heavy-handed, or maybe it was too long for the film. But to anyone who knows the Puccini opera and the 1916 song, the purpose of mentioning the song in the film is very clear.

The way Judy is received in the speakeasy reminds me of the beginning of the second act of Carmen. And her brilliant, vulnerable, devoted, and fragile personality, along with her fame as an actress, reminds me of the character of Floria Tosca (who was based loosley on the actress Sarah Burnhardt) in the opera Tosca. And at one point in the film Judy quotes a few of Juliet's lines from Romeo and Juilet, bringing Juilet's fate to mind. Like all of the above-mentioned opera characters, Judy has difficult choices to make. I will leave it at that (I promosed no spoilers).

The movie isn't on YouTube, but I did find a clip of the speakeasy scene there:



And here's Frank Sinata singing "Poor Butterfly."

Hello again, Finale!

To celebrate the pleasure I had today working with Finale 27 (the finale Finale, and the companion/tool I prefer to keep/use when writing music), I made a new audio recording of my Tuba Sonata using the tuba sound that lives in the program. And then I made a video that incorporates passages from Alice in Orchestralia, I book I loved as a child. Instead of falling into a rabbit hole, Alice falls into a tuba.

You can read the book via this entry in archive.org.

And you can find the music here.

Finale's Finale

I was shocked to hear yesterday's news that Make Music, the "owner" of Finale, an engraving program I have been using for the past twenty-four years, is no longer supporting Finale. I understand the difficulty the company has had trying to keep up with various operating systems, and decided to take the plunge and learn to use Dorico (as the people at Finale suggested). I have known about Dorico for years, and people who use it consider it to be a superior program. Finale users were given a deeply discounted price, so I bought Dorico shortly after reading the news.

The "learning curve" is steep. There are these things called "flows" that I do not understand. They have nothing to do with my needs, so I hope to ignore them. I have tried to customize the way the program looks so that I can feel better about using it while I am using it.

Today I decided to import a piece from Finale so that I could check out the instrumental sounds in the program. My Tuba Sonata was fresh in my mind because I haven't been terribly happy with all the balances on the mp3 recording that I generated from my Finale files twelve years ago. I was able to import MXL files for all four movements quickly, but once I opened them in Dorico the playback was inconsistent. The piano part would randomly become absent from the audio playback (though it would be visible in the little blocks of color that appear in the playback window). When I could hear the piano it was either too loud or too soft. It happened with some movements, but not with others.

I could probably learn how to fix those problems eventually, but I found that the Dorico tuba "sound" to be terribly mechanical and lacking in dynamic flexibility. It was not at all like an approximation of a real tuba made from sound samples generated by real tuba players. And the piano was tinny and unexpressive.

I have come to kind of like the pianist that lives in my Finale program, and I can manipulate her to do just about anything I want. I have no clue how to manipulate the one in Dorico.

The documentation that is on the Dorico website gives diagrams of windows having to do with playback choices that don't coordinate with what I see in the program I downloaded yesterday.

Dynamics, as most musicians know, vary from instrument to instrument and register to register. When a tuba player reads a fortissimo it is a great deal louder than when a pianist reads it. A cello playing loud in the high register is far more piercing than a viola playing loud in the same register. The more I learn about music and about how instruments behave in their natural habitats, the less I trust computer-generated balances. Even in Finale I need to make sample mp3 files from adjusted duplicate notation files in order to counteract Finale's tendency to automatically play a second statement of musical material at a softer dynamic (one of my peeves about Finale).

I will continue to figure out how to manipulate physical aspects of scores in Dorico because I have the program. There seems to be a way to do most everything I need/want to notate, though the path is often clumsy and often involves scrolling down to the bottom of a menu or using paths that seem clumsy.

I believe that this program is not one designed for composers because the process of adding layers seems so very hit and miss, and while editing to get rid of wrong notes it is all too easy to get rid of right ones.

I guess that if you have the music already written on paper in its final form it would be much easier to figure out how many layers you need in each hand of a piano score, and once you get the hang of how to get from one layer to the next, input the layers as you need them. I still have far to go with this experience.

My way of coping is to do more writing on paper, and to keep using Finale 27 on my current laptop computer with its old Ventura operating system. Finale 27 will not work on the upcoming macOS 15 Sequoia operating system, so when I get a new computer, which will have Sequoia built in, I will put Dorico on it but leave Finale on my laptop, where I can use it until either my laptop or I can no longer function.

Remembering my brother Marshall

My brother Marshall Fine died ten years ago today, and in his honor I thought I'd share an impromptu video we made in 2013 (the last time I saw him) reading a Stamitz duet. It was the first time we ever played a viola duet together (we are sightreading). Michael took the video.



You can read all my posts about Marshall here.