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.