Holding onto 2024 just a little bit longer . . .

This is as much a greeting for 2025 as it is a wish to hold onto 2024 as long as possible.

Film about Bach and the Musical Offering

I love this fictional (but based on some truth, and using some seriously plausible imaginary situations) 2004 film about J.S. Bach and two of his sons at the court of Frederic the Great.

I hope you do too.

New Year's Greeting for 2025

I always write a short piece to greet the new year. Now I can consider 2025 greeted. I am certainly approaching 2025 with trepidation, but I intend to keep in mind the many things I am looking forward to.

It is sure to be a good musical year, because I am fortunate to have so much music in my life. And it is sure to be a good family year because I have so much love for my family (and they have so much love for me). And it is sure to be a good year for friendship, because I have good and true friends.

So this piece has an element of optimism in it, as do I.

You can listen here, and find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

Bell Carol in Moldova

My brother Marshall Fine made this excellent arrangement. And hearing it played by the Moldova National Chamber Orchestra brings a real smile to my genes (if genes could smile). Our maternal grandparents (and their parents, grandparents, and ancestors back to the time of Alexander the Great, when Jews were allowed to live in the Pale) lived in Bessarabia, which is now Moldova.



Marshall certainly knew about our family's connections with Bessarabia.

The whole history of my mother’s side has been supplied to me by Aunt Jeanne, Mom’s younger sister, who is still living in Chicago. My maternal ancestor was Michael Bogrod, a Jew from the Bessarabian region of what is now Romania, whose name the immigration authorities rendered as Bohrod. Like Joseph Fine, he must have been Ashkenazi. He had a brother who went to Israel and ran a military institute, Beersheva Institute of the Negev--he was able to retain the original spelling of his name. Michael himself, on settling in Chicago, quickly deserted the faith of his fathers and became a Socialist, at the time of the Palmer raids no less. From him came several children, including my grandmother, Anne (1906-2004), the famous trompe l’oeil artist Aaron, and Milton, who became a doctor in Rochester. All lived to be well over 90.

And now you do too.

N.B. My grandmother and Aunt Jeanne didn't know that the region that was once part of Romania, and later part of the USSR had become  Moldova after 1991. Also, just for the record, our grandmother told me that the original spelling of Bohrod was something like “Bogorad,” and Marshall wasn’t aware (or didn’t make it clear) that our great grandfather was Michael’s brother George.

Stille Nacht!

[You can click here for a closer look at this image.]

"Weyhnacht's Lied," the song we call "Stille Nacht" or "Silent Night," was written in 1816. And the original song was quite a bit different from the interpretations we have understood to be traditional. You can find a convincing argument (with details and images) at the Silent Night Museum.

Here are a few differences: Notice the rest at the end of the first two measures:

Notice the melodic difference here, with that nice D sharp neighbor tone:

And notice the melodic variation here:

And the rhythmic variation here:

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and happy music making for all who find themselves singing this song with a little bit more insight.

Cultural Memory

During one of the last conversations I had with my father, he announced to me that he had a new wife, and that she was a very good housekeeper. Whether he was speaking from a kind of twilight sleep state, or from a place of dementia, I didn't know. I just let it roll over me then, but it has obviously stuck in my mind.

The "new wife" (of more than forty years), told me once some forty years ago that "Jewish women don't clean their own houses." Go figure.

I don't clean very often (and we don't hire anyone to clean), but when I do I always seem to have the V'ahvta, a traditional prayer that would certainly have been recited by my female ancestors who went to synagogue, going through my head. The only time I ever recite it is when I am in a synagogue service or if I am cleaning or working in the yard. Maybe that's a cultural memory.

My father's statement (in his state) might have also been a cultural memory, a memory where the value of a wife for a man was her ability to keep house.

What strikes me as terribly sad is that such a memory would spring from, perhaps, the general state of a "woman's place" during my father's childhood in the 1930s. And that state of possibilities for women to be valued in professions other than as housekeepers and caregivers seems to be narrowing bit by bit as we peer into the darker corners of the immediate future.

Of course there are men who don't buy into this idea. There are men who value the work of women in every profession. There are men who know that for a woman to have achieved the status of a man in many professions means that she is superior in her knowledge and ability to a great many men. It is certainly often the case in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

I wish there were a name for the generation of women I grew up with. One name for the group of people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s is "Generation J," with the J standing for Jones, as in keeping up with the Joneses. But women had a different experience from men. The jump from being the "inferior sex" to a state of relative equality came in a kind of a burst. 

Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until I was in the fourth grade, which would have been 1969, and then we could only wear pants on "gym days." Title IX abolished dress codes in public schools in 1972, and we could wear whatever we wanted to school. Roe vs. Wade happened the next year, and suddenly we had sex education classes in school. We also had drug education classes which scared me away from ever trying hard drugs.

As a result of our new-found freedoms, my female classmates and I were under the impression that we could be equal to "the boys" in every arena. When I started elementary school girls could be teachers, nurses, or homemakers, and when I entered Junior High we could be and do anything. In my extremely liberal school system (in Newton, Massachusetts) girls were rewarded for being smart, and smart girls were expected to become professionals in any field they chose to study.

But now, at least in America, there are an alarmingly large number of young men (or men younger than me) who would not vote for a woman for president, even if the alternative were a convicted felon with declining cognitive function, and a desire to be a monarch in an oligarchy. And there are young men who voice the opinion that they should have a choice over what happens to a woman's body rather than the woman who lives in it.

The part of me that physically remembers the "V'ahvta" while I am cleaning also remembers the time when a motivating factor for a woman to get married was to be able to get away from a domineering mother (or father), regardless of whether she loved the man who asked her to be his wife. I am reminded that it was not too many decades ago that "obey" was part of the traditional marriage ceremony.

We need to let the young women in our lives know that obeying in advance is something they should never do. And we need to let young men (of all ages) know it as well.

Around the Fire

While the holiday season suggests that things should be (could be) merry and bright, the news is anything but. So I have spent the past couple of weeks trying to generate a little musical brightness, both through playing and through writing.

This video, which I made yesterday, has the last movement of a three-movement piece for oboe and string trio as its musical basis, and images of fire interspersed with paintings and woodcuts by the Ukranian artist Issachar Ber Ryback. The images I have used in the video are in the public domain, but there are many more great musical images in his artnet link that I wish I could have used.

I hope this video brings a little joy and a little light to three minutes of your day.

You can listen to the whole piece here, and find the score and parts here and on this page of the IMSLP.

Maestra 2023

Last night we saw Maestra on Netflix, and I would like to recommend it to anyone reading this blog (or this blog post). It began as a look at a few of the finalists in the 2022 Maestra Competition as musicians set as well as their lives as women: women who have to compete in a world dominated by dominant men, mothers who have to work away from their children, women who want to be mothers, women who have to make a choice between a career and a family, and women who want to make career moves that can offer a more stable life. And then in the competition phase of the film we as audience members are asked (not really asked, but we all try to develop an opinion) to decide who we think the winner should be. As one can imagine the standards were extremely high.

The film took an enormous of thought, talent, time, and money to make. It was excellently filmed, excellently edited and directed, and created, from what must have been a huge amount of material filmed all over the world over the course of a few years, a really compelling narrative.

I appreciated hearing the last movement of the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto (three times) as one of the required pieces, and was delighted to hear music by Louise Farrenc as well.

At the final ceremony I saw the face of Natalia Raspopova, a conductor I know (she was the assistant conductor of the Champaign Urbana Symphony in 2023). Natalia, who is an excellent conductor, was in the quarter finals of the competition.

Orin O'Brien "The Only Girl in the Orchestra"

We watched this thirty-five-minute-long documentary about Orin O'Brien on Netflix last night, and I would recommend it to every musician I know (or don't know, for that matter). It was made by Orin O'Brien's niece, and is not only delightful but extremely inspiring. I offer no spoilers, but if you are a string player like me, you might notice an ever-so-slight change in the way you approach your instrument after seeing her, hearing her play, hearing her students play, and hearing her talk.