Vladimir Nabokov's story "Lips to Lips" (Usta k ustam) was published in 1956 (more than twenty years after it was written). His notes mention that at the time of publication "everybody who might have been suspected of remotely resembling the characters in the story was safely and heirlessly dead."
The story, about a would-be writer getting a story published (or a fragment of a story published) in a journal, which he is tricked into subsidizing, brings to mind a recording project I wrote about in 2007.
The experience was a positive one for me. As a novice arranger I got paid what I believe my work at the time was worth. Gene Hoots paid me $15 (in 1998 dollars) per hour for my work transcribing his songs from a shoebox of cassette tapes that he recorded, singing and playing on his electric piano.
I arranged the songs and instrumental pieces for string quartet, and we played a few concerts; Gene sat on the stage and a professional tenor sang the vocal numbers.
Since Gene was a local celebrity, a business owner, and a genuinely nice guy, there was a lot of community spirit involved in the project. His producer, a guy from Las Vegas, got a nice commission from Gene, and the recordings we made graced the jukebox in Gene's restaurant.
After the restaurant was sold the recording we made of Gene's music was no longer sold at the counter, and it was no longer in the jukebox, which is no longer there. The only place you are likely to hear the recording is in the homes or cars of the people who bought the CDs, if they still have working CD players.
Gene's obituary doesn't make direct reference to the CD, but it does mention a country song he wrote "making it to the Bill Board [sic] top 30 Country Music Charts." Here is a reference to it in the Aprl 10, 1993 issue of Cash Box:
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Sunday, February 09, 2025
Quietly Going About My Business
I suppose that's what the majority of musicians have been doing for centuries: going about the business of practicing, writing, arranging, and teaching during times of insecurity, strife, and war. It seems that musicians of my generation (born in the 1950s and 1960s and reaching retirement age in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century) have had the best of all possible musical worlds.
As long as it lasts, we are able to get our hands on far more music than any of us can ever play or even listen to in a single lifetime.
In 2007 Norman Lebrecht declared classical music dead, and he has been proven wrong again and again. In order to keep my sanity I have to remind myself that the current state of many governments in the world (especially what is happening to government in America) can't stop us from doing what we do. It can stop us from getting decent medical care, and it can stop us from being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It can call on us to go out of our way to protect and advocate for colleagues and students who might be in vulnerable positions. We can try to give everybody we know a safe "home" in music, at least while we are playing together.
The quality of music making outside of the major population centers in America has skyrocketed in recent years, as has the quality of music making in what seems like every corner of the globe (I know the world is round, and that globes don't have corners).
Thanks to social media we are able to see and hear how engaged in music people of all ages are. But thanks to the changes that have happened in social media, it is not a comfortable place for me to "play" anymore, and most certainly not a way to find out what is happening in the community where I live. Hearing about local events after they have happened is no fun. What once felt like a "town square" turned into a parade of ads--the computer-based equivalent of those pages of ads that used to be inserted in the local paper, when we had a truly local paper.
As a result of taking the "easy" path to having social interactions, many of us have forgotten how to be social in real time. If we are to survive as musicians and as human beings we need to learn (or relearn) how to take the time to get to know the people who live in our communities, and have real correspondences with people we know who live in other communities.
After being dependent for so many years on the soma of social media apps for an easy "fix" of a fleeting sense of connection, I find that it is really hard to find and maintain meaningful relationships. It was really hard before social media. I remember. As I recall it required a lot of time, a lot of risk taking, and it often involved making and experiencing social faux pas.
Stephen Sondheim explained it so well in Company (1970). "Being Alive" is meant to address the need for meaningful romantic relationships. Now in 2025 I find that the song applies just as well to the need for real friendships as it does to romantic relationships.
As long as it lasts, we are able to get our hands on far more music than any of us can ever play or even listen to in a single lifetime.
In 2007 Norman Lebrecht declared classical music dead, and he has been proven wrong again and again. In order to keep my sanity I have to remind myself that the current state of many governments in the world (especially what is happening to government in America) can't stop us from doing what we do. It can stop us from getting decent medical care, and it can stop us from being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It can call on us to go out of our way to protect and advocate for colleagues and students who might be in vulnerable positions. We can try to give everybody we know a safe "home" in music, at least while we are playing together.
The quality of music making outside of the major population centers in America has skyrocketed in recent years, as has the quality of music making in what seems like every corner of the globe (I know the world is round, and that globes don't have corners).
Thanks to social media we are able to see and hear how engaged in music people of all ages are. But thanks to the changes that have happened in social media, it is not a comfortable place for me to "play" anymore, and most certainly not a way to find out what is happening in the community where I live. Hearing about local events after they have happened is no fun. What once felt like a "town square" turned into a parade of ads--the computer-based equivalent of those pages of ads that used to be inserted in the local paper, when we had a truly local paper.
As a result of taking the "easy" path to having social interactions, many of us have forgotten how to be social in real time. If we are to survive as musicians and as human beings we need to learn (or relearn) how to take the time to get to know the people who live in our communities, and have real correspondences with people we know who live in other communities.
After being dependent for so many years on the soma of social media apps for an easy "fix" of a fleeting sense of connection, I find that it is really hard to find and maintain meaningful relationships. It was really hard before social media. I remember. As I recall it required a lot of time, a lot of risk taking, and it often involved making and experiencing social faux pas.
Stephen Sondheim explained it so well in Company (1970). "Being Alive" is meant to address the need for meaningful romantic relationships. Now in 2025 I find that the song applies just as well to the need for real friendships as it does to romantic relationships.
Thursday, February 06, 2025
One of Us
After receiving the photograph of my great grandmother Anna from my uncle last month, I remembered an obituary from 2021 for my father's first cousin Barbara Bazilian, who was Anna's granddaughter. Barbara's son Eric Bazilian was quoted in the obituary, so I looked him up on the internets and sent him a message that included the photographs of our mutual great grandparents.
My suspicions that the musical genes in the Fine family came to us through Anna might indeed be justified.
Shortly after he got the message the two of us had an amazing talk via FaceTime. It was as if we had always known one another. Eric, who spent much of his life in the Fine family "hub" of Philadelphia, knew our great grandfather Joseph, but he didn't know our great grandmother. She died in 1953, the year Eric was born.
Eric told me about his adventures in music. His are in a realm very different from mine. Eric played (and still plays) in a rock band, and he wrote a song that was a huge hit. Eric sang it for me, but I didn't recognize it. He told me that I was the first person he had met who didn't know the song.
My suspicions that the musical genes in the Fine family came to us through Anna might indeed be justified.
Shortly after he got the message the two of us had an amazing talk via FaceTime. It was as if we had always known one another. Eric, who spent much of his life in the Fine family "hub" of Philadelphia, knew our great grandfather Joseph, but he didn't know our great grandmother. She died in 1953, the year Eric was born.
Eric told me about his adventures in music. His are in a realm very different from mine. Eric played (and still plays) in a rock band, and he wrote a song that was a huge hit. Eric sang it for me, but I didn't recognize it. He told me that I was the first person he had met who didn't know the song.
During the 1990s I was totally occupied with our very small children (born in 1987 and 1989) and working at radio station. At work I listened to the music that I played on the radio, and at home it was cassettes of kid music (dominated by Sharon, Lois, and Bram).
In 1995 I started playing violin again, and once the kids went to bed my musical entertainment for the rest of the decade was practicing.
Once I heard the song (I listened right after that FaceTime call with Eric), I couldn't get it out of my head. I understand completely why it was so popular and continues to be popular around the world. I am so very proud of my second cousin once removed.
Everyone I have told the story to immediately recognized "One Of Us," particularly our kids. It turns out that Eric's song has long been a favorite of theirs, because they grew up in the 1990s, when it was everywhere (except where I was).
Everyone I have told the story to immediately recognized "One Of Us," particularly our kids. It turns out that Eric's song has long been a favorite of theirs, because they grew up in the 1990s, when it was everywhere (except where I was).
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Bleu
Warning: if you haven't seen this 1993 movie, you should. For that reason I am putting spoilers at the end of this post. I'll let you know when to stop reading, but do come back . . .
In 1993 "we" knew a little about music that was written by women during the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century, but there was not much music written by women available on recordings. Some music was published, but not a lot. And much of the music that was published was published by small companies, and/or was out of print.
Most musicians active in the 1990s knew about Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel (Felix Mendelssohn's sister), Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade (at least if you were a flutist--but you might not have known she was a woman), Lili Boulanger and her sister Nadia, who was better known as a teacher than as a composer. Some knew about Germaine Tailleferre (one of Les Six), Augusta Holmes, and Louise Farrenc. I knew of only one recording of Pauline Viardot's music that was available on LP in the 1990s, and it was quite a while before her music was recorded on CD. "Viardot" used to be my word to search for in the early days of the internet. What a thrill it was to finally encounter another person who knew about her.
Most musicians knew something about Wendy Carlos because of "Switched on Bach," but she was establishing her career when she went by Walter. People also knew about Ellen Taffe Zwilich, because she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
Relatively few people knew much about Ruth Crawford Seeger, who was highly respected (for good reason) in new music circles, but her music, though recorded by excellent musicians, was too abstract for most people to play on the radio in the early 1990s. There were more recordings available of music by her and other important composers like Grażyna Bacewicz, Vivian Fine, Thea Musgrave, Sofia Gubaidulina and Kaija Saariaho available beginning in the the later 1990s.
As one of only a couple of women on the reviewing staff of a major CD reviewing magazine, I got assigned most of the recordings that had music written by women. And I played those recordings on the radio, including music by Seeger.
In 1993 "we" knew a little about music that was written by women during the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century, but there was not much music written by women available on recordings. Some music was published, but not a lot. And much of the music that was published was published by small companies, and/or was out of print.
Most musicians active in the 1990s knew about Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel (Felix Mendelssohn's sister), Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade (at least if you were a flutist--but you might not have known she was a woman), Lili Boulanger and her sister Nadia, who was better known as a teacher than as a composer. Some knew about Germaine Tailleferre (one of Les Six), Augusta Holmes, and Louise Farrenc. I knew of only one recording of Pauline Viardot's music that was available on LP in the 1990s, and it was quite a while before her music was recorded on CD. "Viardot" used to be my word to search for in the early days of the internet. What a thrill it was to finally encounter another person who knew about her.
Most musicians knew something about Wendy Carlos because of "Switched on Bach," but she was establishing her career when she went by Walter. People also knew about Ellen Taffe Zwilich, because she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
Relatively few people knew much about Ruth Crawford Seeger, who was highly respected (for good reason) in new music circles, but her music, though recorded by excellent musicians, was too abstract for most people to play on the radio in the early 1990s. There were more recordings available of music by her and other important composers like Grażyna Bacewicz, Vivian Fine, Thea Musgrave, Sofia Gubaidulina and Kaija Saariaho available beginning in the the later 1990s.
As one of only a couple of women on the reviewing staff of a major CD reviewing magazine, I got assigned most of the recordings that had music written by women. And I played those recordings on the radio, including music by Seeger.
Now I'll talk about the movie. Spoilers follow!
My memory of Bleu, which I saw in 1994 (it came out in 1993) was that it was a film about a composer going through a period of grief. I didn't think of myself as a composer at that time, and couldn't fully understand the nature of the protagonist's struggle. Seeing it thirty years later I realized that it is a portrait of Julie (played by Juliette Binoche) who was a ghostwriter for her husband, a composer held in such high regard that he had been commissioned to write a piece celebrating the unification of Europe.
Julie's husband Patrice and five-year-old daughter die in a car crash. Julie survives and as part of her grieving process she gives everything away, puts her (huge) house up for sale, goes back to her birth name, and destroys the manuscript of the work-in-progress attributed to her husband.
Her deepest desire is to do nothing. To be nothing.
But the music, mostly heard in monody, keeps haunting her, particularly while she is swimming. Julie is deeply attuned to a recorder player playing on the street, which is a clue to her musical sensitivity. At a few points during the film (and the beginning, at the middle, and near the end) there is speculation that Julie has actually written the music attributed to Patrice, something that she avoids addressing (perhaps because it is true). When her husband's assistant lets it be known (in a televised interview that Julie sees by chance) that he is planning to finish the piece (he took pictures of the score before it was destroyed, perhaps after the accident), Julie objects to his heavy-handed and opportunistic treatment of the music, and is compelled to complete the piece herself. She does it in her apartment, without a piano, and using the same handwriting that we saw in the manuscript before it was destroyed.
Julie also learns, from a photo shown in that television interview, that her husband had a mistress for many years. The assistant tells her that the mistress is a lawyer. Julie tracks the mistress down, and seeing that she is pregnant, confirms that Patrice is the father of the child she is carrying. Julie is very kind to the mistress, and gives the mistress the house that she, Patrice, and their daughter lived in. The mistress told Julie that Patrice spoke of her kindness and generosity.
The text of the piece, sung in Greek, is the famous section from chapter 13 of First Corinthians.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.I can't get it out of my mind that in chapter 14, which follows in the King James Bible, we get the passage about women being silent in church.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
This passage, by the way, is what brought about the process of castrating choir boys during the 16th century (but probably beginning far earlier) so that they could sing the soprano parts in sacred music.
Zbigniew Preisner wrote the excellent music for the film, which is available on Criterion.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Tonality and Life (drawing, that is)
My mother, who was a musician before she became a painter, told me, as she was showing me her life drawing sketches, that these were her "scales." (The quotation marks are mine, of course.)
With certain exceptions, human beings have bodies with the same number and kinds of limbs, and when drawing an unclothed model, a well-schooled artist would learn to understand the structural components of the human body: the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins.
It occurred to me this morning, while I was reading (slowly, of course) through the extremely triadic and tonal Beethoven Piano Sonata, opus 79, that the variety of musical tools (texture, dynamics, voicing, phrase structure, repetition, silence, etc.) available when working with functional triadic harmony is akin to the structure of the human body. The things that make every human body unique are like the things that make each piece of tonal music unique.
Whether you want to use the structural components that make a piece of music feel grounded in tonality or not, I think it is really important to study functional harmony as thoroughly as possible in order to write original and imaginative contemporary music that feels "right." Functional harmony is, to me, like the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins that support music and allow it to flow.
It occurred to me this morning, while I was reading (slowly, of course) through the extremely triadic and tonal Beethoven Piano Sonata, opus 79, that the variety of musical tools (texture, dynamics, voicing, phrase structure, repetition, silence, etc.) available when working with functional triadic harmony is akin to the structure of the human body. The things that make every human body unique are like the things that make each piece of tonal music unique.
Whether you want to use the structural components that make a piece of music feel grounded in tonality or not, I think it is really important to study functional harmony as thoroughly as possible in order to write original and imaginative contemporary music that feels "right." Functional harmony is, to me, like the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins that support music and allow it to flow.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
What it must be like to be tone deaf
Vladimir Nabokov's dislike of music is common knowledge (especially because of the well-known quotation above from Speak, Memory).Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.
In his lecture on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Nabokov finds sympathy in Kafka's feelings about music.
Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting.Nabokov explained in a 1964 Playboy interview that he was "bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians."
I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener.
A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.
In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today.
What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animallike quality.
This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.”
Nabokov's short stories are full of visual descriptions. Overflowing, perhaps. I always wondered how such (what I would consider) musical sentences could come from a person who claimed he hated music. But his stories have given me more of a clue about his relationship with music.
In "Wingstroke" Nabokov mentions a "Boston," which is a waltz:
When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston.Being able to describe the rhythm of a dance shows that his ear is not unmusical (rhythm is part of music after all), but perhaps he wasn't able to discern the difference between pitches, which is what I understand actual tone deafness to be.
In "The Seaport" he shows that he certainly has an ear for texture:
Inside, beyond the tables, a violin wrung its sounds as if they were human hands, accompanied by the full-bodied resonance of a rippling harp. The more banal the music, the closer it is to the heart.Maybe for a person with synesthesia, like Nabokov, who is hyper-endowed with the ability to translate his hightened visual sensitivities into language, describing music without the ability to appreciate its pitches is akin to a color blind person trying to describe the colors used in painting, or the ones that appear in nature (like in butterflies).
To Victor any music he did not know--and all he knew was a dozen conventional tunes--could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue: in vain you strive to define at least the limits of the words, but everything slips and merges, so that the laggard ear begins to feel boredom.And I can't resist using this passage from elsewhere in the story to end this post:
The music must be drawing to a close. When they come, those stormy, gasping chords, it usually signifies that the end is near. Another intriguing word, end . . . Rend, impend . . . Thunder rending the sky, dust clouds of impending doom.
Friday, January 24, 2025
Emilia Pérez
The film is excellent in many ways, but the music, written by Camille and Clément Ducol tops them all for me.
Aristides von Manowarda Viola d'Amore Duet
[Played so beautifully by Yvain Delahousse and Cheryl Swoboda]
But who was Arisides von Manowarda? All I could find out is that this piece is part of a collection of manuscripts and published material that belonged to Karl Stumpf that is in the archives of the New York Public Library. You can follow this link for the contents of the archive.
von Manowarda was around Vienna in 1942, and his parents were singers connected with the Vienna State Opera (Josef von Manowarda and Cornelia "Nelly" Pirchhoff-Manowarda), where Aristides seems to have played viola, but that is all I know (aside from learning from the above Wikipedia article that his father was a Nazi). Maybe that's all I need to know. I hope Aristides didn't embrace his father's ideology, but fear he may have.
Oy.
If you know more please leave information in the comments. Or maybe it is better not to know more.
But who was Arisides von Manowarda? All I could find out is that this piece is part of a collection of manuscripts and published material that belonged to Karl Stumpf that is in the archives of the New York Public Library. You can follow this link for the contents of the archive.
von Manowarda was around Vienna in 1942, and his parents were singers connected with the Vienna State Opera (Josef von Manowarda and Cornelia "Nelly" Pirchhoff-Manowarda), where Aristides seems to have played viola, but that is all I know (aside from learning from the above Wikipedia article that his father was a Nazi). Maybe that's all I need to know. I hope Aristides didn't embrace his father's ideology, but fear he may have.
Oy.
If you know more please leave information in the comments. Or maybe it is better not to know more.
If I am not for myself . . .
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?Hillel the Elder is well known for this bit of wisdom, which can be interpreted and applied in many ways. One application has to do with self care versus selfishness. Another has to do with not waiting for a time when it is convenient to stand up for yourself (or for others).
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
I have been thinking about this in relation to people promoting the creative work that they do. The idea of "self-promotion" has never been attractive to me. Perhaps it’s because I came of musical age in a world where people I encountered would spend a lot of time letting me know how well they played and how great their career was progressing.
I came up with the phrase, "Play it, don't say it," when I was at Juilliard in the 1970s. I rarely said it out loud, but I often found myself thinking it about when engaging socially with many of my fellow instrumentalists.
I preferred to spend time with people who showed their artistic qualities through their playing, but those were often people who had little time for socializing because they were usually practicing.
I have learned over the decades that nobody will pay attention to me or my work if they don’t have any idea who I am or what I do. And since I do not have (or do not hire) a professional person to promote my work, I am left to do it myself. That means I have to engage in some sort of self-promotion, something I have come to accept as necessary if I want to play in the musical world.
Fairly recently (before I stopped using Facebook) I got a response from a moderator of a forum after sharing a link to a piece of music in the IMSLP that I thought would be of interest to the group. The moderator (or bot) said that self-promotion was not acceptable in this forum, a forum that had previously encouraged the sharing of new music and transcriptions.
In the Meta world is "self promotion" now the opposite of "paid promotion?" I wonder.
I have learned over the decades that nobody will pay attention to me or my work if they don’t have any idea who I am or what I do. And since I do not have (or do not hire) a professional person to promote my work, I am left to do it myself. That means I have to engage in some sort of self-promotion, something I have come to accept as necessary if I want to play in the musical world.
Fairly recently (before I stopped using Facebook) I got a response from a moderator of a forum after sharing a link to a piece of music in the IMSLP that I thought would be of interest to the group. The moderator (or bot) said that self-promotion was not acceptable in this forum, a forum that had previously encouraged the sharing of new music and transcriptions.
In the Meta world is "self promotion" now the opposite of "paid promotion?" I wonder.
Now that Facebook has effectively replaced the public square, the pathways towards constructing musical communities that involve people who don't live in cities (where they can participate in real time with multiple networks of musicians) are hard to find and even harder to create for adults who are not connected with universities or other musical institutions.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Transcription: Florence Price Adoration now for String Quartet or Flute and String Trio
I have wanted to make a string quartet arrangement of Adoration for quite a while. A friend asked me to make an arrangement for flute and string trio for a concert that I am playing with her in March, and I was thrilled to find that the arrangement I made in A major works just as well for string quartet as it does for flute and strings.
The upper register of the flute and the violin are polar opposites: the flute, when played expressively, is quite opaque up in the ledger regions of the treble clef, while the violin can be transparent, brilliant, or transparently brilliant.
You can listen here. You can find the score and parts here as well as on this page of the IMSLP.
The upper register of the flute and the violin are polar opposites: the flute, when played expressively, is quite opaque up in the ledger regions of the treble clef, while the violin can be transparent, brilliant, or transparently brilliant.
You can listen here. You can find the score and parts here as well as on this page of the IMSLP.
Monday, January 20, 2025
None Shall Escape
I was first attracted to the 1944 film "None Shall Escape" because the music was by Ernst Toch, one of my favorite twentieth-century composers. And then I remained amazed at the frankness and the prescience of the film, which was made during World War II.
You can watch it on YouTube here.
Silvie Pierre wrote an excellent essay about the film in 2000, which you can read in an English translation here.
You can watch it on YouTube here.
Silvie Pierre wrote an excellent essay about the film in 2000, which you can read in an English translation here.
"Bewilderment" by Florence Price
What so many of us are feeling on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
[performed in 2021 by Karen Slack and Michelle Cahn]
I ask you this:
Which way to go?
I ask you this:
Which sin to bear?
Which crown to put
Upon my hair?
I do not know,
Lord God,
I do not know.
[performed in 2021 by Karen Slack and Michelle Cahn]
I ask you this:
Which way to go?
I ask you this:
Which sin to bear?
Which crown to put
Upon my hair?
I do not know,
Lord God,
I do not know.
Langston Hughes
The title of the poem is "Prayer" as found in Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927)
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Ghosts of Chicago
Michael and I are two thirds of the way through Erik Larson's 2003 The Devil in the White City, a book about the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In addition to being fascinating, reading it has prompted me to look deeper into my maternal (Chicago-based) family history.
I imagine that my grandmother took this photo of my mother June Blume (the eight-year-old girl on the left), her father Henry (obviously in the foreground), and her grandmother Machko (her actual name was Elizabeth Blume, neé Rabinowitz) sitting behind Henry. My grandmother would have made the dress.
I know that my mother was no older than eight because when she was eight she had rheumatic fever which left her with arthritis. Going out in a boat would not have been in the cards.
The site of the World's Columbian Exposition was Jackson Park, and I know from Michael's search of the 1940 census records that the Blume family lived in Ward 7 of Chicago. I recall their apartment was on a street in the 60s (it could have been 68th street), just five blocks from access to one of the Jackson Park harbors. This picture could have been taken there. And it could have been taken with my grandfather's Argus C3 camera, which I used as a teenager before it was stolen.
My investigative mind wandered to Henry's father, Israel (I have written about him here), who, as I learned from his gravestone, was "a restless soul who found peace."
Israel died at just fifty-four in 1932, the year my mother was born.
I know that Machko lived with Henry and my grandmother Anne in 1940 because she was named in the census as part of their household. I'm unable to find out any information about my great-grandmother's death because there is so little information on the internets about women, particularly widows, from the early 20th century.
I do know a lot more about Henry, but I will save that for another time.
I imagine that my grandmother took this photo of my mother June Blume (the eight-year-old girl on the left), her father Henry (obviously in the foreground), and her grandmother Machko (her actual name was Elizabeth Blume, neé Rabinowitz) sitting behind Henry. My grandmother would have made the dress.
I know that my mother was no older than eight because when she was eight she had rheumatic fever which left her with arthritis. Going out in a boat would not have been in the cards.
The site of the World's Columbian Exposition was Jackson Park, and I know from Michael's search of the 1940 census records that the Blume family lived in Ward 7 of Chicago. I recall their apartment was on a street in the 60s (it could have been 68th street), just five blocks from access to one of the Jackson Park harbors. This picture could have been taken there. And it could have been taken with my grandfather's Argus C3 camera, which I used as a teenager before it was stolen.
My investigative mind wandered to Henry's father, Israel (I have written about him here), who, as I learned from his gravestone, was "a restless soul who found peace."
Israel died at just fifty-four in 1932, the year my mother was born.
I know that Machko lived with Henry and my grandmother Anne in 1940 because she was named in the census as part of their household. I'm unable to find out any information about my great-grandmother's death because there is so little information on the internets about women, particularly widows, from the early 20th century.
I do know a lot more about Henry, but I will save that for another time.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Connections
I stopped using Facebook a few weeks ago, and it hasn't been easy. Like the zillions of people who, over the past two decades, followed the siren song that put them in easy-as-pie contact with people they knew from every corner of their lives, I got sucked into feeling the illusion that connections I had through the app were real connections that would continue if I were no longer using it.
That is, unfortunately, not the case. A good many of my (former) Facebook friends also made the decision not to feed the beast. They are probably feeling the same kind of "let down" as I feel every time I pick up my phone. I though that once I left Facebook my email correspondence might increase, but there is very little I see of a personal nature in my inbox.
Most of what I get are substacks encouraging me pay to subscribe, messages asking me to support candidates for public office in states other than my own, advertising emails from stores I have purchased something from during the past year or two, countless reminders about medical appointments (five or six about a single appointment), and bulk messages from people I do not know who ask me to listen to recordings and make blogposts about them. Most are in musical styles that I am not equipped to discuss. Clearly the people who send those requests have never actually read my blog.
Sometimes I get a request to review a recording that is both appropriate and interesting to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time.
I still do the stuff that I do, and find joy in the doing. But I feel like I have forgotten exactly how to interact with people the way I once did. When I do send a personal email I worry that I might have said too much, or that the person getting the email message, who is not as prompt at ridding their inboxes of spam and ads as I am, might forget to respond.
That is, unfortunately, not the case. A good many of my (former) Facebook friends also made the decision not to feed the beast. They are probably feeling the same kind of "let down" as I feel every time I pick up my phone. I though that once I left Facebook my email correspondence might increase, but there is very little I see of a personal nature in my inbox.
Most of what I get are substacks encouraging me pay to subscribe, messages asking me to support candidates for public office in states other than my own, advertising emails from stores I have purchased something from during the past year or two, countless reminders about medical appointments (five or six about a single appointment), and bulk messages from people I do not know who ask me to listen to recordings and make blogposts about them. Most are in musical styles that I am not equipped to discuss. Clearly the people who send those requests have never actually read my blog.
Sometimes I get a request to review a recording that is both appropriate and interesting to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time.
I still do the stuff that I do, and find joy in the doing. But I feel like I have forgotten exactly how to interact with people the way I once did. When I do send a personal email I worry that I might have said too much, or that the person getting the email message, who is not as prompt at ridding their inboxes of spam and ads as I am, might forget to respond.
Remember the email exchanges we had twenty years ago, when the internet was young? I loved those days.
I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases.
I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases.
At least mine has.
This new "normal" (and I guess it is normal and human to communicate in ways that we can control, particularly when it comes to not questioning whether what we say and what we hear is true) is going to take a lot longer to adjust to than I thought.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Clayton Haslop Playing Kreisler
Here's a gentle (and beautiful and exciting) reminder of the some of the beauty that exists and endures in our world:
It is so refreshing to watch this video and hear him talk about breathing, and technical aspects of holding the bow and the violin that I teach to my students (and practice myself).
It is so refreshing to watch this video and hear him talk about breathing, and technical aspects of holding the bow and the violin that I teach to my students (and practice myself).
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