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.

Harris Walz II "Conventional"

You can find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

Hat Hack

It was a day that was both windy and sunny. I really wanted to wear my straw hat, but feared that it would fly off in the breeze.

So I opened a drawer in my desk and found an old shoelace (I always save them if they are in good shape). I fastened it to the little loop on the inside of the hat band, and look what happened!

When it is windy I can tie the shoelace under my chin, and if it isn't windy I can tuck the ties inside the hat.

Notice the bonus use of the shoelace to tie the hat around my waist if I don't want to wear it. Needless to say the other shoelace is now attached to another hat, and both hats can hang nicely on a single hook.

Why have I never thought of this before?

Now: A Retrospective

This is a contradiction in terms, to be sure, but there is no way to talk about "now" unless we do so in retrospect.

I was thinking the other day, while in the bathtub, where my sense of "now" is most active (particularly the moment when I submerge my shoulders and neck), that what we are doing as musicians is making it possible to anticipate, experience, and reflect on material that is happening at a time that we can call "now." We can put everything in place to experience that "now" (or, as composers, allow other people to experience it) by replicating the instrumentation, the horizontal and vertical configuration of pitches, and the dynamics and the textures of the pitches involved.

Yesterday during a consort rehearsal my three friends and I were able to repeat a particular "now" in a piece of Phinot we were playing--a subtle change of mode over three measures that sounded like an opening and closing of a window to the early twentieth century. We did it several times. It was so satisfying.

Phinot, who wrote the piece "then," made that particular "now" possible.

If I were skilled in philosophy I could explain it much better.

When we play a piece of music written by somebody who is no longer alive, we make a musical "now" possible. I'm not talking about authenticity, since there is really no such thing as musical authenticity (unless we are talking about physical objects like instruments or manuscripts). Any performance given at any time is going to be informed by the vast musical experience and vast personal experience of anyone playing or singing, and any performance or reading is going to be different.

I like to think of the huge number of people over time who have shared a thousand musical "nows" with me as I go about my musical life. It is a kind of a community.

I have been obsessed with the idea of "now" on and off for what seems like an eternity. And I tried to depict the idea in musical terms in an opera I wrote based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen."

I wrote a blogpost about the segment of the opera that concerns the idea of eternity as a "now" back in 2009. Here's a bit from that post:

I have used minimalism, but only in context and for specific purposes. In the case of this moment in my Snow Queen opera, Gerda, while en route to find her friend Kay, is stuck for what might be eternity in a magic garden. The concept of eternity looms large in the opera, and the above excerpt happens in the opera's temporal center. The text comes from a passage in Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart, which was published in 1883.

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.

The idea here is to make a minute and forty-four seconds seem like a huge amount of time: to mark the moment of now in music that, by its very nature, consists of a series of events that take place over time. This is, of course, distinctly different from the real (or imaginary) moment of actual "now."

Some day I will hear it performed. Here's a computer-generated recording of it as a stand-alone piece for soprano and string quartet, and a link to a PDF.

And I just found out that the thesis I wrote for my master's degree (a full analysis of the opera) is available online here.

Harris Walz now for Trumpet and Piano

I have been writing a series of obbligato parts to accompany the piano original.

My friend Daniel Gianola-Norris and his pianist friend Yvonne Wormer recorded this configuration of "Harris Walz" yesterday afternoon.



The trumpet and piano arrangement is now on this page of the IMSLP.

Leaping Past Zinnias

Elizabeth Tingley is a remarkable writer. I am very familiar with many of places she writes about in the book since I live in the Illinois town where she grew up. I also know many of the neighborhoods and locations she describes in New York and in the Boston area. I am in the rare position to report that she describes these places exactly as they are (or were in the later 20th century).

The madness and murder in the title concerns her brother-in-law Michael Laudor, who killed his pregnant girlfriend in 1998 during a psychotic episode, which was covered (after it happened) by the tabloid press.

Tingley's story is extremely honest, and devoid of sensationalism. It is an intimate portrait of the Laudor family, and a beautifully written account of how her experience with them intersects with her particular daemons (which she is able to work through methodically in the course of her life). It is a beautifully told story of survival--a book I really didn't want to put down.

While looking at reviews of other books and articles about Michael Laudor, particularly this review of this book, I thought about illusions of windows into the minds of people we are close to can only give us a suggestion of what might be happening in their minds. I have also observed that people suffering from mental illness are not necessarily reliable witnesses.

Elizabeth Tingley tells the story of her own life in detailed connection with Michael Laudor's brother Richard. She is a reliable witness, and an honest one.

If Gidi Rosenfeld's review about the shortcomings of Rosen's book resonates with anyone interested in the subject of Michael Laudor or of mental illness, I would suggest reading Elizabeth Tingley's memoir in order to get a more nuanced picture of Michael Laudor.

This is also an important book to read if you are interested in how childhood trauma (and I imagine everyone has childhood trauma to some degree) can, if addressed and worked through with good mental health professionals, be far less of a burden in adulthood than if unaddressed. Elizabeth Tingley became a child psychologist in order to figure out how to process her childhood trauma, and she became a writer in order to be able to write about it. And she did. And I am glad. It just came out last week, and I am honored to be one of the first readers. 

 Here's a link to the book on Amazon.

Harris Walz (somebody had to do it)

I spent yesterday feeling very happy because of the news about Kamala Harris's choice of Tim Walz as a running mate in the 2024 election. Here's a one-minute waltz I wrote to commemorate the day and the choice.

You can find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

UPDATE: I have made three transcriptions (so far): one for cello and piano (a cello obbligato to go with the solo piano original), one for viola and piano (a viola obbligato), and one for trumpet and piano. All are available through the transcription tab on the above IMSLP link.

Want to learn more about Nathaniel Dett? There's a blog for that!

And here it is! And here's Nathaniel Dett's page in the IMSLP.

Steller's Sea Eagle performed by Nathan Groot

Steller's Sea Eagle is one of the world's largest raptors (with a wingspan from six to eight feet). This is a portrait in A major, where the eagle soars up the C string (the largest string on the viola) and makes its way up the A string all the way up to C sharp above the treble clef staff.

Confidence

I have long held this bit of wisdom from Stevens Hewitt, "Competence is enough. Competence is all there is," close to my heart, but I'm starting to believe that competence needs to be combined with confidence in order to make the statement really ring true.

As I make my daily way towards competence on the piano (as well as competence on the violin and the viola), I find myself rewarded by the fact that I can now, in many instances where I previously had trouble, get from one note to the next or one passage to the next with a real sense of intention. It was something that I longed to be able to achieve during decades and decades of dedicated practice, but until relatively recently thought was impossible.

I always thought my problem was due to some kind of hard-wired musical handicap, like not having absolute pitch (in my household absolute pitch or near-absolute pitch was the norm). It was particularly problematic when I played the flute. I would record myself and hate the fact that what I heard lacked the sense of direction I wanted. Playing with a metronome helped, but it only gave the illusion of phrase direction because of the regularity of the beat. Playing with the metronome on off-beats helped, but the "swing" that resulted seemed to vanish when I turned the metronome off.

It was not as much of a problem when playing violin or viola because configurations of up-bows, down-bows, and slurs could temper the problem. But as I became more competent as a player, my musical standards went up, and I really wanted to correct this inability to make phrases go the way I wanted them to go.

Then, after doing a lot of therapeutic work on myself and learning how to understand things about my childhood that were too painful to fully acknowledge while I was going through adulthood and early middle age, I began to develop a sense of confidence about who I was as a person. I spent my youth dwelling on the things that I wasn't or didn't have, and have had the great fortune to consider my younger years from a distance.  And eventually (and remarkably) the barriers that made it so difficult for me to make phrases that could go the way I wanted them to go were no longer there.

Technically it probably has something to do with having the clarity to pay attention to the direction, speed, and feel of my bow during the note I am moving from to the note I am going towards. These developments started to make physical sense to me around the time I wrote this post about musical doorways on 2023.

And now I am able to control the motion between pitches while playing the recorder, which means I have officially moved beyond whatever it was that was holding me back. 

I attribute this giant step in music making to overcoming a profound lack of confidence that began in early childhood. I must have masked it well because nobody seemed to notice it, and nobody (no teachers or parents) ever talked with me about it. Most of them just contributed to the problem by, I guess, ignoring it.

I think all human beings love watching confident people at work. I love watching artists, gymnasts, and craftspeople work. I feel a sense of physical comfort when I listen to and watch a confident musician. And if that musician is playing or singing virtuoso music, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and excitement. If I hear a person speak with confidence, I feel confident myself, unless that confident person is saying something that angers me. If, for whatever reason, I hear someone I admire lose confidence because they trip over their words, I feel their lack of confidence personally.

I know I am not alone. People experience lack of confidence in different ways. Some people, for whatever reasons, seek reassurance from others in order to believe that their work is adequate. Some people (like me) prefer to judge the work we do ourselves, being well aware of our shortcomings, and knowing that we do the best we can do, always considering the habitually perceived handicaps we carry around with us and try to eviscerate with everything we create.

I believe we can instill confidence in our students. We can do it by really listening to them and commenting in a way that reinforces the things that we observed them doing correctly. It is also important to acknowledge the things that students struggle with and show them ways to address the difficulties. Most of all we need to make it clear that the inability to do one thing or another is not an inborn deficiency. I also think that giving students permission to fail relieves the blow to their confidence if they (gasp!) make a mistake. 

This doesn't mean that we should give them a free pass if they habitually forget to count or habitually forget to look at the key signature or listen for intonation.

By helping students to gain confidence in lessons, and by encouraging students to instill confidence in themselves between lessons (always a struggle), I believe that we offer them far more than the ability to play an instrument or the enjoyment of being able to express themselves musically and communicate musically with others. 

We are giving them tools to organize the world in terms of things that they can do and will be able to do if they apply themselves. And if we are lucky they might even spend a part of their formative years being kind to themselves and, in turn, being kind to others.

One thing that gives me confidence is that I have not passed this "trait" onto our children. They are highly competent and confident adults, great parents, and great teachers.

Mozart K330 Andante Surprise

During these days of chaos and uncertainty, I find myself spending more and more time with music that is organized and certain and have been finding my greatest solace in Bach and Mozart.

Yesterday I came across this odd E-natural half note in measure thirty-nine of the Andante of Mozart's 10th Piano Sonata, K330 that would make more sense to me if that E-natural were a quarter note on the second beat of the measure, since it is so deeply at odds with the F naturals in the bass when it falls on the first beat. But it is in the first edition, published while Mozart was still alive, and it is in the manuscript (shown below the first edition).

My solution to the problem of mitigating that extra dissonance is to play it very softly.

[click for larger images]

Anyway, I did notice something surprising about this manscript: Mozart used the soprano clef for the right hand.

Of course I looked at all the Mozart Piano Sonata manuscripts I could find in the IMSLP, and I found that he only used the soprano clef in one other sonata: the F major, published as number 12 (K332/300k). But then I noticed that this is one that Mozart titled "Sonata III." Look!

I looked up "soprano clef" in Merriam-Webster, and was disappointed to see that their definition of it could be taken as misleading.

They are, of course, talking about the published words "soprano clef" being first used in 1786. Just in case you are wondering, Mozart's 10th and 12th Sonatas were published by Antaria in 1784 with a treble clef in the upper staff. I wonder if the first use of "soprano clef" in print might have been referring to something related to that publication. Probably not.

Also, don't bother to click on the illustration link: you will get a treble clef, not a C clef. You will find a better explanation here.

Reconsidering perfection, again

It seems that the more confident I become as a musician, particularly as a string player, a composer, and as a teacher, the less I look for approval. But I do seek recognition, which I use literally here: I like to be recognized for what I am trying to do. I am my own very harsh critic, and feel mainly "right" with myself and my work when I know that I have done my best. And doing my best means fixing the problems I create for myself.

When I teach I am responsible for finding solutions to problems that other people have created. And I feel like I have accomplished something when any person I teach (or help) either internalizes those solutions, or is inspired by them to come up with alternatives.

As a young student I was a parasite, and though I sometimes remember the source of a particular solution, sometimes I don’t. I rarely learned anything from my formal private flute lessons, because my "official" teachers were more interested in themselves than they were in me.  But friends who shared musical thoughts and ideas with me were (and still are) my best teachers. Even the dead ones, like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and Boulanger

Writing resonant music that is comfortable to play (on any instrument) is really important to me. I aspire to write music that helps people fall in love with music itself, and to communicate that love to the people they play with. It’s an added bonus if there is somebody listening. And if someone recognizes a kindred spirit, I have accomplished the kind of connection I hope for.

And I really enjoy it when something I have written or arranged compels students and friends to be expressive. Freedom of expression is a sacred freedom. And there is no perfection in expression.

My experience in the world of musicians (close contact to high-calibre professionals from a young age) has taught me that there is always someone who can play better and write better. Could you imagine playing at a level so high that it feels like it is impossible to improve? Could you imagine the pressure to maintain that illusion of perfection night after night? And could you imagine peaking as a child and losing that ability to touch the sun at the relatively young age of thirty-five? Or fifty. There is an illusive goal of of perfection in execution, but, thank goodness, in composing there is no perfection. There are only choices. 

I actually don't believe in perfection, and I stand by a blog post I made nearly twenty years ago concerning perfection. It was my first blog post.

I think what really matters is becoming more musically genuine as a result of being able to express feelings through our instruments and through the musical phrases we encounter (or create).

Butterflies abound

Nathan Groot put this lovely video of the "Gorgon copper butterfly" from Advanced Viola Scale Studies on Youtube today.


I thought it might be fun to mention, for other butterfly lovers, that the tresillo rhythm (3 + 3 + 2) of the etude is directly related to a piece that I wrote for viola and piano in 2002 called "Tango Mariposa." Here is a link to a recording played by Istvan Szabo, the person I wrote the piece for. I also made a transcription of it for viola, cello, and harp in 2003 that I hope to hear played some day.

Trouble in River City!

I came across this film clip of Meredith Willson explaining how "Trouble" from The Music Man works.

I first encountered this man when I read his memoir, And There I Stood with my Piccolo which I read (in one sitting) in the Boston Public Library when I was a teenager. I learned something about how shows and operas were put together when I realized that The Music Man had melodic material that threaded its way through every song. I have also come to understand that the “think method” can be a really valuable tool (when combined with actual practice).

What a brilliant man. This is the first time I have seen a film of him in action, and I am so excited to share this experience!

New String Orchestra Arrangements for 2023 and 2024

I regularly add arrangements to this folder, and every couple of years I make a post listing the more recent arrangements and original pieces I have added. Some arrangements are in the IMSLP, and some are (for obvious reasons) not.

You can access the folder here.

(Darling?) Starling

My friend Martha's sister suggested that my bird might be a starling. Boy does that make sense. After all, Mozart bought a starling back in 1784 because he heard it in a pet store singing the theme of the last movement of his 17th piano concerto. They are really smart birds, and can learn their vast repertoire of material from sources other than other birds.

I have certainly seen starlings in the yard, but I dismissed the idea of a starling (I had forgotten that the starling was the star of the Mozart story, and not some other bird) because I might have some prejudice against them. I associate a flock of starlings with a loud and distinctly unmusical clatter, but I had never heard one sing a solo before.

When we first moved to town in 1985 there was a starling invasion of sorts. And they seemed to congregate in the two tall oak trees in the front yard of our rental house. Our landlord used to clap pieces of wood together to get them to leave, partially because they were loud and annoying, but mostly because they raided his squirrel feeders.

Yes. They are an invasive species. The European Starling made its way across the Atlantic because back in 1890 a group of Shakespeare-loving New Yorkers wanted to have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's works to be present in Central Park.

The huge flocks of starlings that spent time in our town have withered during the past 40 years. I only see them occasionally, here and there.

But our yard (we moved to our own house in 1991) must have had meaning for a flock of starlings one evening in the early 1990s.

We were leaving the Wilb Walker grocery store (which is no longer there) when we noticed that the tree across the street in front of Valerie's Hair Affair (it is no longer a hair salon) had starlings all over it--like leaves. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of birds.

We were headed for home, but thought we would have a little adventure and follow them. Their destination happened to be our back yard. There they were: spread out like a black carpet.

What are the odds?

I read Jan Sibelius quoted somewhere (or maybe it was in a memoir) that the musical life of a place is directly related to its bird life. But I never imagined that it could go both ways. That some birds can get their material from the music that they happen to hear. Or that while we are watching them and listening for them, they might be watching us and listening to us.

Hab ich einen Vogel?

From time to time I write about the bird with the singular song that visits our yard. None of the bird-identifying apps and none of my bird-wise friends (and I have the most wise of bird-wise friends) have identified the species of this bird by its song, which I can duplicate exactly on the violin.

My most trusted bird-identifying friend suggested that it might be a singluar song made by a bird who knows many, like an oriole, but the timing is wrong. I have heard this bird as early as late February. And it comes back every year.

I hadn't heard it for a good month and a half, and this morning, while I was practicing some Haydn (the "Razor" quartet, not the "Bird") on the violin, it returned.

It sang (that's a midi rendering of a piccolo), and then I played. It sang back, and I played back. We went back and forth in rapid succession, maybe ten times. Maybe more.

I have had this musical exchange with this particular bird over many years.

Our back yard has a creek in it, which seems to be the home of a great deal of wildlife. Our house is at the top of a small hill, and the room where I practice could very easily be in, according to a bird's eye view, a tree.

I'm wondering now if that bird could have learned his or her song from me practicing a passage like this over and over (as I have been known to do).

Here's an interesting article about the repertoire that some birds have.

The Gish Gallop for Piccolo and Piano

Twelve years ago, in 2012, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had a debate on television. Romney bombarded Obama with so many half truths and outright lies that his debate performance was (or appeared to be) weak. The technique Romney used is known as "The Gish Gallop."

You can read the fine print at the bottom of the image of the first page to learn more, or you can read the next paragraph in this nice large blogger typeface:

The Gish Gallop is a debate strategy where one person provides a large number of weak or false arguments in order to overwhelm his or her opponent. It was coined in 1994 by the anthropologist Eugenie Scott to describe the debate technique of the American creationist Duane Gish, who used it to challenge the science of evolution. A rapid succession of lies is presented with the goal of wasting an opponent's time, thereby casting doubt on his or her debating ability. It works best in debates that don't involve fact checking.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Gish Gallop in her Letters from An American commenting on Thursday's televised presidential debate. I can think of other four-letter words that "gish" to describe that debate, but I am determined not to allow myself to dwell on the negative elements of the evening.

I did, however, travel back in time by way of various drafts on my computer, and finish this little bit of chaos I started in 2012 that is based on Liszt's Grand galop chromatique.

[June 30, 2024]

You can listen to a computer-generated recording here. You can find the score and part on this page of the IMSLP. And now maybe I can get it OUT of my head and get a decent night's sleep.

The Unicorn

A few weeks ago I found a poem that my mother wrote. Today would be June's ninety-second birthday, so I'm sharing it here and now in honor of her memory.

The Unicorn

There's a forest that's hidden, somewhere in a dream
Where a Unicorn drinks from a bubbling stream
An owl once glimpsed his luminous form
And instantly knew this was not quite the norm.
He whispered the secret to all of the trees,
The trees told the rain and the rain told the breeze.

The Loon, who swam every night in the lake,
Making giggling sounds such as only loons make,
Retold the owl's story for all to hear.
Spectators came running from far and near.

The Pundits all smiled and winked their eyes,
for loons are well known to elaborate lies.
But the Hunters were ready, with arrows and spear,
To capture the Unicorn when he should appear.

They littered, they skittered, they tittered away,
Leaving beer cans and plastic cups after their play.

"Wonder of wonders, the Unicorn's real,"
The people all shouted and screamed in their zeal.
"Wonder of wonders, this is no lie."
They bought Unicorn T-shirts and Unicorn Pie.
"Wonder of wonders, It's not a hoax."
The Pundits all scrambled for Unicorn jokes.

But, soon all the people were bothered to tears,
Unicorns were coming out of their ears.
They stopped looking and fighting for Unicorn toys,
And turned instead, to things that make noise.
Again, trophy hunters prepared to go forth,
To find the Next Object; be it East, West or North.

And the Unicorn took a long drink from the stream,
Then, stepped back in Silence, In Time and in Dream.

Performance of my Woodwind Quintet No. 2 "Four Winds"

I just found this excellent performance from September, 2023 by flutist Faith Wasson, oboist Mary Robinson, clarinetist Beth Vilsmeier, horn player Martina Adams, and bassoonist Rick Barrantes on YouTube, and thought I would share it here.



Listening to it makes me think about how much I loved playing woodwind quintets as a teenager.

Summer Strings 20th Anniversary Concert July 9, 2024 at 7:00

Every summer for the past twenty years has been filled with string music here in Charleston, Illinois, and this May and part of June it was filled with cicada music, particularly in areas with old hardwood trees and creeks. People from national network news (I can't remember which network, but I think it might have been NBC) came to town in order to cover the emergence at its epicenter, but they weren't here when the various broods (we had at least three) were screaming and clicking at lawnmower volume. But we were here.

And now they are gone. Every last one of them. And our birds, deer, squirrels, and other animals, including dogs, were well fed with their manna from heaven.

Our Summer Strings program was set by March without a thought of cicadas, but once I made a string quartet transcription of a piece for two violins I wrote during the last Magicicada emergence back in 2011, and once I played it with some of my Summer Strings friends, there was no other choice but to make a version of it to put on the program for this year's Summer Strings concert. And it is particularly approrpriate in this location, among a lot of hardwood trees and along the town branch of the Embarass River, where the larvae of millions of Magicicada Brood XIX (who will next emerge in 2037) might even be listening. They are just babies, so there is no danger of any activity. Here's what we will be playing:

The theme of the concert is "Christmas in July," which means it is an excuse to play "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," my favorite Christmas holiday song. In Monteverdi's "Zefiro torna" the warm west wind comes after the cold of winter, but most importantly it is a chaconne with a bass line that repeats throughout the piece. "Once Upon a December" has cold and icy pizzicatto dressing up a waltz that sings of nostalgia, "California Dreamin'" is a longing for the warmth of Los Angeles on a day in winter from a place where "all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey."

"You Must Believe in Spring" by Michel Legrand yearns for spring even in the deepest winter.

The other songs should be familiar, but only dedicated readers of this blog would know that the "Humoresque" on the program must be the one by Ethel Barns rather than the one by Antonin Dvorak. I have loaded this arrangement into the IMSLP, and it should be available soon.

Shaloncé Royal (the professional wrestler) sings Pergolesi

This past Friday evening an assisted living/memory care facility in our town held a professional wrestling event. It is quite unusual to think of memory care and professional wrestling in the same mind's eye, but it happens that Devonte Knox, an extremely impressive professional wrestler, works by day (and occasionally night) as a CNA, helping residents in memory care navigate daily tasks with extreme gentleness and good humor.

He organized this event in order to share what he does with the people he works with and cares for. Professional wrestling is a performing art that is definitely not in my wheelhouse, to say the least, but I am really happy that I watched the exhibition because the opening act included Shaloncé Royal, a wrestler who is also a soprano! She drove all the way from Atlanta to Illinois to take part in the show because of Devonte.



And she is an excellent singer. Here she is singing "Stizzoso, mio stizzoso" from Pergolesi's La serva padrona

Funereal dusky-wing butterfly and American crocodile

Nathan Groot, who is in the process of recording the viola version of Advanced Viola Scale Studies (i.e. upscale tales, because they use the full range of the instrument in all positions), posted these two pieces today. As a set they work as a study in contrast. Groot plays "Funereal dusky-wing butterfly," which is in B minor, at a funereal tempo, which is really difficult to sustain. It's kind of like an adagio in ballet: so much more difficult than it appears from the outside. At this tempo it is really beneficial for the bow arm as well as the left hand, with shifts, vibrato, and basic intonation (which is never basic).

Part of my inspiration for the lighthearted nature of "American crocodile" was actually not a real crocodile at all. The crocodile smile and the musical motion did come from (wild) life, but the spirit also comes from Lyle, my favorite fictional crocodile.

I love the way Nathan Groot plays it here:

Thumb and One (and lots of other teaching tools)

I thought of this little "slogan" while teaching a lesson the other day, and drew a nifty picture to help remind my students (and I guess other people's students, now that I have shared the image) that order to play the violin or the viola confidently in tune in the first position in keys that don't have flats, it is helpful to have the position of the thumb on the neck and the first finger (on any string) directly across the fingerboard from one another.

Sometimes I put a "like" (thumbs up) sticker where the thumb goes (if I have one handy), but any sticker will do. It helps if it is a sticker you can feel.

I was surprised to see that I have made forty-seven teaching posts on this blog. Some of the ideas are a little wacky, but some of them are pretty good.

You can see for yourself!

The number forty-seven has a particular (and I guess peculiar) meaning in our family. So I'll share this little bit of family lore.

Just because it's June

My friendship with the cellist Daniel Morganstern goes back to June of 1978, when one of his students was a summer roommate. We were, as he said, "an octave" apart. I was eighteen and he was thirty-six. He and his wife June acted like surrogate parents to me. I thought it was such amazing serendipity that my mother, also named June, had the same birthday: June 30th. June might have attributed it to a steller synchronicity, but the friendship between me, Danny, and June has lasted and deepened through the decades.

Shortly after Danny began his work as an editor with the International Music Company, I helped him by writing program notes and engraving scores into Finale. There are a few arrangements in his huge IMC catalog of editions and two-cello transcriptions of the cello repertoire that are mostly my work, and I am proud to say that this arrangement of Tchaikovsky's "June" from The Seasons, Opus 37a, is one of them.

You can order the music here.

Kreisler, Kroll, Banjo, Fiddle, and Hadelich

Perhaps this is just an excuse to share this wonderful (and new) performance by Augustin Hadelich of William Kroll's "Banjo and Fiddle," but I did happen to notice the similarity of the first motive of the Kroll to a motive in Fritz Kreisler's "Allegretto in the Style of Boccherini."

Here is Augustin Hadelich's performance of the Kroll:



And here is a recording of Fritz Kreisler playing his Allegretto:



The Kreisler, published in 1910, came first. The Kroll is from 1945. It is one of Kreisler's "in the style of pieces" that were actually original compositions, and it is unlikely that he found this catchy motive in a piece by Boccherini.

Angela Bofil

I just learned last night that Angela Bofil died last week. I knew that she had been wracked with health problems since her strokes in 2006 and 2007 because I have been following her career since the beginning. Why? Beause she was the first (and only) pop star that I could, at least for a weekend in 1978, call a friend.

A pianist friend of mine at Juilliard named Iris knew Angela from growing up in New York, and Iris had written a love song about her crush (and then, apparantly later boyfriend) Michael, a violinist at Juilliard. Iris wanted to have flute in the song, and I guess I was probably asked to do it because I was someone she considered friendly and open to improvisation. I was also planning to be around during the summer. The three of us drove to Long Island to Iris's family house, and we had a rather cozy and crazy "girls weekend," complete with astrological readings and a night walk in the boggy wilderness. Angie was doing a colonic cleanse accompanied by a strange diet in order to starve herself to be "pop-star thin." It was a real struggle for her to "look" the part of a pop star, regardless of her musical ability. I remember that she also made constant calls to her manager. We improvised a great deal, which was really fun. She was a tremendously gifted musician who had a remarkable voice. I also remember the first line of the song, which we never did end up recording.

Marion Bauer's Elegie: transcription and a shallow dive

I have been making my way through Marion Bauer's piano music, and came upon this lovely Elegie that was published in 1904, when Bauer was twenty-two. The Elegie and its companion piece "Arabesque" were her first published compositions. She dedicated Arabesque to her sister, Emilie Frances Bauer, who was her first teacher, and she dedicated the Elegie to her second teacher, Henry Holden Huss.

The title page indicates that the John Church Company was part of the Canadian Department of Agriculture, but I can't find any other references to that particular Canadian connection. The company was started in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1885 and incorporated in 1889 by John Church Jr. One of its subsidiaries was the Boston-based Everett Piano Company, and another was the Royal Manufacturing Company in Cincinnati which made more portable instruments: drums, violins, mandolins, guitars, and banjos.

By the late 1870s they were one of the largest publishers of sheet music in the United States. The company was acquired by Theodore Presser in 1930.

I immediately thought of transcribing it for violin and piano, and then noticed that with a few minor alterations it works really well on the flute. So here it is!

PDF files for the score and parts for both versions are available on this page of the IMSLP. You can listen to the violin version here, and the flute version here.

Marion Bauer Four Songs, Opus 16 set to poems of John Gould Fletcher

I am so grateful to learn about the American imagist poet John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) from the American composer Marion Bauer (1882-1955). The four songs published in 1924 as Opus 16 don’t seem to be available for purchase as a set but "Through the Upland Meadows," "Midsummer Dreams," and "In the Bosom of the Desert" are published as separate titles by Schirmer, which is now Wise Music (print on demand). For some reason Schirmer/Wise has not reissued "I Love the Night," the third song in the set. However the complete 1924 Schirmer edition is available at six university libraries and can be found through the worldcat. If you are a soprano looking for great music to sing in English that uses tonal language like that of Lili Boulanger and Gabriel Fauré (particularly his Verlaine songs), you should consider adding these Bauer songs to your repertoire.

Marion Bauer wrote this set of songs in 1922. "Through the Upland Meadows" is dedicated to the singer and early-music scholar Yves Tinayre, and "I Love the Night" is dedicated to the Canadian soprano Éva Gauthier, who premiered the song in Aeolian Hall on October 23, 1922. Lillian Gustafson gave the first performance of the entire set on March 21, 1925.

We know that Bauer was considering orchestrating this set of songs, because she developed a four-handed version of the piano part, which is something she did in preparation for orchestrating.

It is not known if she ever completed the orchestration. This set of of songs would make an excellent orchestration project for a composer familiar with Bauer's orchestral work who is in a position to gain permission to make and publish an orchestration. I don't believe that I am important enough a composer for Wise to consider engaging for such a project.

When I performed Marion Bauer's exquisite viola sonata back in 2012, there was very little information to be found about her life and work. Here is what I knew at the time (from a program):

The American composer Marion Bauer grew up in Walla-Walla, Washington, moved to New York in 1903, and then traveled to France where she exchanged English instruction for lessons in composition and analysis with Nadia Boulanger (Bauer was the first of Boulanger’s many American students). When Bauer returned to New York, she helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composer’s Alliance. She and Amy Beach were founding members of the Society of American Women Composers. Bauer taught composition, analysis, and music history at New York University from 1926-1951, and she taught at The Juilliard School from 1940-1955. She was a mentor and teacher to Ruth Crawford (Seeger), Aaron Copland, and Milton Babbitt. In addition to writing three books about music, Bauer wrote a great deal of chamber music, piano music, and vocal music, but only a small number of her many publications have been reissued, and her work as a composer was largely forgotten after her death.

Now we have an annotated list of her known works, and Mount Holyoke has collected and catalogued fifty of her manuscripts in their library. There are now also twenty-five of her pieces available in the IMSLP.

I have really enjoyed listening (again and again) to this set of four songs on a new recording called "New Moon" that will be released on June 20th by the Boston-based arts organization Calliope's Call. The Bauer songs are performed exquisitely by soprano Evangelia Leontis and pianist JJ Penna. Also on the recording are songs set to a reworking/translation of poems from the Persian poet Hafiz by the American composer Sarah Hutchings (sung by Leontis), "Valentines from Amherst," settings of Emily Dickenson's poetry, by the American composer Jodi Goble, and Libby Larsen's "Love after 1950" set to poems by Rita Dove, Julie Kane, Kathryn Daniels, Liz Lochhead, and Muriel Rukeyeser, performed beautifully and thoughtfully by Penna and mezzo-soprano Megan Roth.

The recording ends with a great unaccompanied two voice setting by Gilda Lyons of  "The Parting Glass," a traditional Scottish poem.

Now that I have enjoyed Bauer's setting of the four Fletcher poems, I want to read more of his work. I am looking forward to reading his books and collections of poems that are in the Internet Archive. 

I learned from an entry in the Poetry Foundation website that John Gould Fletcher was born in Arkansas in 1886, and his father, who had the same name, was a member of the confederate army. That family background might eventually have led him, after immersing himself in music, French Symbolism, and Asian art and philosophy, to be associated with a conservative group of poets called The Fugitives.

Fletcher started writing poetry while he was a student at Harvard, and after his father died in 1906, and he inherited the family fortune, he dropped out of Harvard. A few years later he left for Europe, and returned only after the outbreak of World War I.

If you follow the above link on the Poetry Foundation website you will find the rest of his fascinating biography, which involves friendships with Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and many other interesting people.

In 1938 Fletcher received the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems, and then his work fell into obscurity.

There are many creative people in various creative fields (music, art, literature) who have done work I admire with whom I do not share sympathetic feelings. I think that Fletcher might be one of them. He was an exact contemporary of Florence Price, who was born in Little Rock 1887 and lived there at the same time there as Fletcher did. Price also was in Boston studying at the New England Conservatory at around the same time Fletcher was a student at Harvard. (While he was at Harvard he spent much of his time visiting museums and going to concerts--maybe some were at the New England Conservatory.) 

Back in Little Rock Fletcher would have been in the some of the same physical spaces as Price (or at least walked the same streets), but Fletcher might not have seen someone like Florence Price as a person he would want to know because of her race. And I bet he would have admired her music, which he could have heard either in Little Rock or in Boston. I am, of course, eager to be proven wrong about this hunch.