Adventures in vibrato (and time and space)

I spent some time last week attempting to make a satisfactory recording of the violin part of "My Antonia." I was planning to combine it with a recording of the computer-generated piano part, so that I could give some sense of "my" Antonia's violin voice for people, like Lisa, who have shown interest. Antonia is a remarkable violin, but I haven't yet been able to make a recording that did her (it) or the piece justice.

One thing I learned from my experience trying to record the piece is that my arm-powered viola vibrato is just not fast enough for this violin. 

This morning I began my quest to bring it up to speed. 

Practicing scales using regular rhythms tends not to be stimulating enough for me, but my eye caught a copy of "Weights and Measures" that I keep by my music stand. And "Spacial Scale," one of the lyrical pieces, ended up being exactly what the doctor ordered.

I practiced "Spacial Scale" in each of the minor keys, allowing myself time and room to find and enhance resonance in different areas of the fingerboard (the feeling of vibrato is different in different positions because the angle of the arm is different), making my way stepwise from one pitch to the next using as fast and as continuous a vibrato I could produce. Transposing these scale pieces is surprisingly not difficult. The pitches travel up a step or down a step. They also jump the octave or repeat at the unision. It is easy for the inner ear to hear where the next pitch will be, and you don't even need to know the name of the pitch you happen to be playing. This gives you (and me) a chance to focus on the physical aspects of playing, in both the left hand and the bow arm, as well as the sound.

After a trip around the circle of fifths, I jumped into a few Rode etudes (hit the Rode), and was pleased to find that my vibrato had gained a little speed. I sounded a little bit more like a violinist.

What more could anyone ask for in an instrument than having it compel us to become better players?

Jule Styne on Inspiration

The music that Jule Styne wrote for Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol is really remarkable. Though Mr. Styne would say that "enthusiasm is hardly inspiration" (in another context, I know), I was so enthusiastic about the music that I have loved since childhood that I was inspired to look Styne up in the IMDB. Like you, I knew he wrote the music for Gypsy, but that was as far as my knowledge went before yesterday. Now I know more. I really appreciate this statement he made that is quoted in the IMDB:

Enthusiasm is hardly inspiration, it's perspiration. I think only amateurs have to be inspired in some ways. You're a professional, you do your job. The inspiration comes later on when you haver already got something and are inspired to make it better, better than it is. When I write a score for a play, just to give you an idea, I write between forty and fifty songs to get sixteen. Sometimes they accept this, and I come back but I change this, and they say,'Gee, this is better', or 'No, we'll keep the original'. But I test. I draw on myself.

The Third Stream of Personality Type

The traditional classifications of "introvert" or "extrovert" have never helped me to find my place of comfort and community in the world. And the concept of "ambivert," a mixture, I guess, of being an introvert and an extrovert, having tendencies of both, never resonated with me.

I do have a deep need for connection with other humans (hence this blog, and hence my need to write music and share the music I write), but I have always been hesitant (to the point of avoidence) to join any organization, even an organization of people who share my interests.

I certainly have a sense of "we" when it comes to family, musical groups I play with, and individual friends I might be in conversation with, either in person or by correspondence, but I feel extremely awkward socializing in a great many situations. Which, I guess, is why I don't.

A couple of weeks ago I came across the term "otrovert," and I took a test on this website. I enjoyed taking the test a great deal (they ask such good questions), and scored very high on the otrovert scale.

Michael got the Kaminski book from interlibrary loan, and we are both reading it.

Never in my life have I felt so "seen," not that being "seen" is going to change anything.

A Question of Karma

This is literally a question about karma, as it is used in casual conversation, and not corresponding to Indian ideas of rebirth (an element of faith that is impossible for living beings to prove right or wrong).

I have wracked my brain (Michael's too), but haven't come up with a single incidence in history (aside from apocryphal tales) where something bad (aside from matters of disease or legal consequences, like imprisonment or execution) has befallen a person who did something really rotten to a person or to a group of people.

I know that I am not alone when I like to believe that the laws of literature ring true to the laws of life, but every instance of poetic justice or "just desserts" I can come up with is either a matter of fiction or a matter of belief (as written in religious texts).

So, dear blog reader, please give this matter a bit of thought, and if you come up with something that you have experienced in real life, please share it in the comments. And please stay away from matters of religious belief or faith.

Just for the record, I have known people who have done lousy things, have learned from their mistakes, and have worked to become better people through therapy, learning experiences, support from friends or family, or through music, literature, or art. Those examples are everywhere. Thank goodness.

Queendom is a Word!

The OED tells me that queendom has been in use since 1603, which is the year that Queen Elizabeth I died.

Why couldn't it have been in use during the forty-five years of her reign?

I have learned so much lately about scientific discoveries made by women, and I seem only to learn about them when looking in a figurative rearview mirror. The literal rearview mirror, by the way, was invented in 1909 by Dorothy Levitt.

It was a surprise to me as well. Here is a page from Levitt's book, The Woman and the Car (you can find the whole book here). Please click this image for a larger view of necessities for travel. You will see that a mirror is on top of the list.

I found this information on this page of Trey and Monica's Adventures in California History.

Mi Y'malel, retold for String Quartet

I only wish that making improvements and rearrangements in life were as easy and as satisfying as making improvements and rearrangements in music. When I write or when I arrange I feel like I have total control over my tonal "kingdom" (or "queendom, which is not a word, but should be). But when I encounter the news of the day during this festival of lights, there is nothing I can do except to try to shine some sort of musical light, to make a few minutes of musical entertainment light up the shadows that threaten to darken our spirits.

You will find the above arrangement for string quartet under the transcription tab of this page of the IMSLP. You can also find a PDF here, and listen here.

But who can retell the things that befell us? Who can count them? In every age some hero or sage came to our aid.

I like to think that there are millions of heros and sages among us today (in every part of the world) who are on the side of light, freedom to live, and the side of love.

Happy fourth night of Hanukkah.

Mi Y'malel (Who Can Retell) for the first night of Hanukkah, 2025

For violin, viola, and piano or violin, cello and piano. The music is available here.

My Antonia for National Violin Day

I feel so in sync with the part of the universe that declares days national this day or national that day. I just learned that today, December 13, is national violin day. Maybe I should spell that with initial capital letters: National Violin Day.

I just happened to have finished, after working on it for six weeks or so, a piece for my new-to-me violin. I put the final touches on the score, part, and cover last night, very close to midnight.

I spent many years coveting a lovely German violin made in 1791 by Johannes Doerffel of Klingenthal in Geoffrey Seitz's violin shop in Saint Louis, Missouri, and I finally took it home with me this past August. Because of its soprano voice and magical high register, I named it “Antonia,” after a character in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “Councillor Krespel.” Antonia is the central figure in this 1818 German story concerning a violin maker and his daughter, who had the voice of a violin. Here is a revealing excerpt from the story.

He had scarcely bowed the first notes when Antonia cried out joyfully, “Why, it’s me — I am singing again.”

Truly, the silvery, bell-like tone of the instrument had a special and marvelous quality of its own. It seemed to come from the human breast. Krespel was deeply stirred. He played perhaps more compellingly than ever before. And when, with his fullest power, he would storm over the strings in brilliant, sparkling scales and arpeggios, Antonia would clap her hands and cry, delighted, “Ah! I did that well. I did that splendidly!” Often she would say to him, “I should like to sing something, father.” And then he would take the violin from the wall, and play her favorite songs, those which she used to sing. Then she was quite happy.

I am sure that my violin, my Antonia, was being played somewhere in Europe during the time that Hoffmann was writing his story.

You can find the music here, and listen to a computer-generated recording here. You can also find it on this page of the IMSLP.

"But," You say. "Isn't My Antonia a book by Willa Cather?"

Of course it is. But Cather's novel (and central character) sports a diacritical mark over the initial Á.

[Since my friend Daniel Morganstern is celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday in a couple of weeks, I dedicated the piece to him.]

A Perfomance of "The Collar" in Denmark by Julia Reparip and Per Svenson

It is so satisfying to hear this performed in Hans Christian Andersen's native country! The video should start at the beginning of the piece.

Holiday Strings Concert December 6, 2025

You can listen to a recording from last night's concert here.

I feel so fortunate to be able to work with this group of people, who all live in rural downstate Illinois. For this concert we had a couple of librarians, a small handful of university professors, a few dedicated string teachers, a bunch of grown-up people, some who play multiple instruments (in addition to strings) and sing, and a healthy number of kids (elementary through high school). Our conductor doubles as a teacher of meteorology, and he makes sure we get safely to rehearsals and back (we only had two for this program).

I get to make all the arrangements, and I get to fix the mistakes I make in the parts, which is a real gift. I also get to spend the next year at work on new music for next December, which I hope will help keep me in good spirits for the daunting year ahead.

Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians

This hefty and very interesting book is a collection of conversations between Larry Ruttman, a lifelong Boston-area music lover who spent his first career as a lawyer, and twenty-one musicians: composers, performing musicians (including conductors) and musical administrators. The chapters are not presented in the usual interview format, which I find refreshing.

Larry Ruttman asks interesting and interested questions to these musicians, all who have some connection to Boston. I grew up in Boston, and know a great deal about some of the people in the book, so it was quite an experience to encounter the more "unsung" musicians in this collection of "subjects."

The most surprising "subject" for me by far was Cecylia Arzewski. I knew her from her days in the first violin section of the Boston Symphony, and always admired her. I vividly remember the summer evening she came to my house to play quartets with my father, when we had a cottage near the Stockbridge Bowl, a mile and a half from Tanglewood. I remember her saying how tired she was after practicing for six hours that day. They played the Brahms A minor Quartet, and it was fantastic to hear.

Cecylia left her position as assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony to be the associate concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1987, and she later became the concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony, where she spent the rest of her career.

Imagine my surprise to read what she had to say about Seiji Ozawa, and the talk she had with him before she left the BSO.

Ozawa  told her that he wanted to hold auditions in order to rearrange the first violin section. Larry Ruttman asked Arzewski if Ozawa demoted anyone. Arzewski didn't want to give the names of people, but Ruttman mentioned, of all people, my father.

Ruttman was under the impression that my father had left the orchestra at that point, but he was mistaken. My father was removed from his position as principal in 1993, and, in some ways just to spite Seiji Ozawa and his years of abuse, remained in the viola section while receiving, as I recall, principal pay. He retired in 2004.

Arzewski described my father as a great violist, a loner, a thinker, and a very bright man. She said that she saw what was happening to him before she left, and saw that Seiji Ozawa had "designs" on my father. She said that everybody knew it.

I am so grateful that Cecylia Arzewski said the quiet part out loud. It was extremely difficult for me and members of my family to process the decades-long abuse that my father hand to endure. Ozawa did little things, like tell my father that his bow made too much noise. My father used to say that Ozawa told him that his bow went "tick-tick-tick" when it should go "woo-woo-woo." This sent my father on a very expensive quest for a succession of bows that Ozawa might be able to tolerate. Ozawa criticized my father's leadership, while everybody in his section felt greatful to have him as a leader. When my father recorded Don Quixote by Richard Strauss (the solo viola plays the part of Sancho Panza to the the solo cellist's Don Quixote), his name was left off the record cover.

But I digress . . .

There is a lot that is worthwile in this book. I found the chapter about Joan Tower particularly interesting. I also enjoyed reading about Robert Levin's experiences as a student of Nadia Boulanger. I got a little annoyed in the chapter about Benjamin Zander, because the Ben Zander I knew when I was a teenager and as a young adult (I played flute in his New England Conservatory Youth Chamber Orchestra when I was in high school, and played in the Boston Philharmonic when I was in my very early twenties) seemed to have faded away at the time of the interview had with Larry Ruttman. I would have liked to have "seen" the person I once knew, but time does have a way of changing people (including me).

You can find the book, read an excerpt, and read some reviews of it on Amazon.

Holiday Strings Concert in Charleston December 6!

This is the first concert of the winter season for me. And it is a great excuse to share this image of an oil painting made by my mother, June Fine.

A Whole New World and The Same Old Me (but a little older)

The longer you live, the more you see. The more you experience, the more you value the things that haven't changed too much.

Musically (and outside of my own musical changes) I have seen worlds around me accept and reject trends. Serialism, or what my father used to call "Mickey Mouse music," made its way into the highest eschelons of musical performance, even though the musicians at the top of the "classical" musical profession had a really difficult time putting their hearts and souls into it.

Fortunately most people in the listening audience couldn't tell whether the sounds those musicians were making were happening at the proper times. If a skilled professional has a hard time hearing complicated cross rhythms, your average music-savvy listener isn't going to know whether playing correctly or not. Same with intervals that exist between the "cracks" of the keyboard. I have not yet met a musician who could accurately divide a whole step into "slices" smaller (or slightly larger) than a quarter tone. And quarter tones need to be tuned by ear to match the guesses of the other people in an ensemble playing or singing them in order to get that brownish quarter-tone color that some of us recognize as correct.

Please challenge me on this point. I have asked before, and have never gotten a response.

After a long time of listening and playing, I can hear quarter tones, but if I try to sing them it is always a random guess as to where the pitch should go--never a measurement.

I have witnessed technical playing levels in young people (people in their twenties) escalate. I have heard tremendous improvements in wind-player intonation, thanks, in part, to excellent teaching and instruments that are far better than the ones I grew up with.

The musical world I grew up in was dominated by men. Most of the music that I heard in orchestral concerts was written by men. Nearly all orchestral concerts were conducted by men. A female brass player was an anomaly. Female wind players were treated differently from their male colleagues.

Orchestral jobs were hard to get, but somehow, when audition procedures for non-major orchestras became fair, the best players for the job often turned out to be female. This happened in orchestras in major cities, and it happened in orchestras in smaller cities. (The ugly truth behind salary discrepancies between men and women principal wind players in major orchestras didn't come to light until a few years ago.)

We all know that women have been writing music for a very long time, and we all know that music written by women appears on a relative handful of programs of orchestral music. A great many dedicated people tried to change this a few years ago. A few succeeded for a time, but I'm not seeing any kind of practice really stick in the world (Midwestern United States) around me. I have written a lot on the subject of composers who are women here. You can read a bunch of posts here, if you are interested.

But I keep on keeping on, because I trust that the world around me will keep changing. Clearly social media and the bottom-feeding gleaning and regurgitating device that calls itself intelligence will never give me an accurate report on whether people play the music I write or not, but I will just keep on doing what I do, because it is what I do.

Recognition means very little to me. I am wired not to believe it when someone says something good about me or what I have written. I do, however, know when something I do is something of quality, and it pleases me greatly when someone recognizes that quality and uses it to further their expressive musical experience.

And I know when I am playing in tune, counting correctly, and when I am communicating with my musical colleagues in a meaningful way.

In an Old House in Paris à 4

In 2020, when musicians were figuring out ways to connect remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I devised a musical conversation that could be held between two people over the internet. Because of the technical factors that make listening and playing at the same time impossible, like the slight delay (latency), the meter and timings had to be carefully planned in order for the musical conversation to be a fulfilling experience.

I made versions of this two-voice piece for every combination of instruments that I could think of, and enjoyed playing it with a great many people.

At the suggestion of the Academy String Quartet, I recently made an adaptation of the piece for string quartet. I simplified the meters, and added some harmony and counterpoint so that it could be played by an in-person string quartet. I expanded a few sections, but the spirit of the piece remains the same.

The rhythms of the musical motives correlate exactly with those of a well-known book for children that begins with the phrase, “In an old house in Paris.” The text is not reproduced in the score, but anyone familiar with the text should be able to puzzle together which musical phrase fits with which phrase in the text. It is my hope that the music can stand without the necessity of the text being heard by the audience, but the incorporation of a narrator would certainly be fun.

You can find the score and parts here, and also on this page of the IMSLP, under the transcriptions tab.

Wiegala for SSA choir, vocal soloist, and orchestra

"Day and Night," the image I used for the cover of the score, was made by the thirteen-year-old Eva Lora Sternová (1929-1942), one of the children imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp (transport AF no. 254 on March 3, 1942). Before her deportation she lived in Brno. After spending seven weeks in Terezín, Eva was sent to Izbica (transport Aq, no. 647 on April 27, 1942), and murdered there.

Ilse Weber (neé Herlinger) (1903-1944) was born in Witkowitz, in what became the Czech Republic, wrote children’s books, and worked as a producer for the Czech Radio in Prague. She was sent to Terezín on February 8, 1942 (Transport W, no 995), where she worked as a night nurse for children. Weber was sent from Terezín to Zamość on April 28, 1942 (Transport Ar, no 16) and spent two years, there. She was sent to Auschwitz on April 10, 1944 (Transport En, no. 1064), where she was murdered.

Ilse Weber wrote many poems and songs while in Terezín, Zamość, and Auschwitz, the best-known being “Wiegala.” Aviva Bar-On, one of the surviving children Weber looked after while in Terezín, remembered the song from her time there.

Ilse Weber and Eva Sternová were in Terezín at exactly the same time, and because Weber was in charge of the children, it is possible that the image of the moon as a lantern in Eva’s drawing might have even been inspired by the second stanza of the song (or Eva’s image might have inspired Ilse’s lyric). It is difficult not to see it as a picture of the moon as a lantern looking down on the world.

This setting for vocal soloist (any voice type), and chamber orchestra (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and strings, with a passage for solo violin) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony for a concert commemorating Kristallnacht, given yesterday, November 9, 2025, at Temple Adat Shalom in Los Angeles, with Noreen Green conducting.

The text of the song is in the public domain, I made the translation, and the cover image by Eva Lora Sternová, comes from the collections of the ©Jewish Museum in Prague. This image is used by permission for inclusion here and in the IMSLP. You can go here to find it in the IMSLP, and can also find the score and parts here.

Dido and Aeneas and Gilbert and Sullivan

I do not claim to be any kind of scholar, but sometimes I notice things that occupy my mind.

Now that the (very short) run I played of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is over (I got to play my new-to-me old violin with a baroque bow), I am allowing myself the chance to follow up on some observations I had about the opera. I ask you in advance to forgive me for assaulting your ears with YouTube ads before the samples.

The first thing that caught my ear was the chorus of sailors at the beginning of act three (in Dido and Aeneas):

which reminded me of "No Never" from H.M.S. Pinafore (sung here by Kelsey Grammar playing the part of Sideshow Bob, singing the part of the Captain of the Pinafore):

Then from The Pirates of Penzance I noticed that "Stay Frederic, stay!" Nay Mabel, nay,"



has a parallel (at least for me) in Act three of Dido and Aeneas, at the moment Aeneas tells Dido that he will stay, but Dido urges him to leave because Jove told him to:



There is a pervasive "sense of duty" motive connected with Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid that I can't seem to stop associating with Frederic's pervasive sense of duty, remembering that the alternate title for The Pirates of Penzance is "The Slave of Duty."

Maybe it is all the stuff of the British opera stage, and is otherwise meaningless, which is probably why I found nothing about in JSTOR articles or on google, save an "incipit" from the google "artificial intelligence" telling me that sometimes Pirates and Dido were performed on the same program.

Maybe it happened once. I can imagine the two operas sharing a set, but it would have been a long night for the audience and the singers.

My Two Cents on Weight Loss Drugs

A whole lot of people in the United States are unable to buy enough food to feed themselves and their families, while working at jobs that do not have salaries high enough to pay for the necessities of life. And people who rely completely on SNAP benefits might not have the time or the cooking knowledge to live on the $6 per day (per person in a household). Shelf-stable foods that can be bought in bulk like peanut butter, and Ramen noodles, lentils, beans, and rice could keep a person from starving. Those staples could be augmented occasionally with longer-lasting and inexpensive root vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and onions, but how much of your six dollars per week can be devoted to creating and maintaining enough food to make buying in bulk make sense when you have (as a single person) limits. And what if you need to pay rent, pay for a car, go to a doctor, take medication.

And what happens when SNAP benefits are stopped because of a government shutdown? Local (non-federal-government) organizations help. As a species, most human beings seem more than willing to help.

So in the middle of all this lack of adequate food for adequate nutrition, we have weight loss drugs being made more affordable for people to try and achieve a BMI that fits a profile that the medical establishment has deemed healthy.

I have had, as many people with the ability to have a life where food insecurity has never been a problem, times when my BMI has been thirty or forty pounds above the "normal" range on the chart (eating to excess for pleasure, eating to excess for emotional reasons, eating after concerts).

I remember encountering "the chart" in the Junior High School library, and though I was a healthy seventh grader, my weight fell into the "obese" range for my height. It messed me up, for sure, and for decades.

But I am not "wired" to be a thin person, and, through eating three healthy meals a day filled with foods that I really like, I weigh pretty much the same as I did when I was in seventh grade. I have no desire (or ability) to achieve normalcy.

Back to weight loss drugs. I don't have a problem with people using them if they feel they need them, and are in a position to afford to use them for the short term (until they figure out how to eat less and exercise regularly in a way that works for their bodies) or for the long term (for the rest of their lives).

It's the "rest of their lives" thing that gets me. It becomes a dependency that drains money from the pocket of the person who needs the drug into the pocket of the company that makes it.

Doctors can (and do) perscribe weight loss drugs because of the benefits that being out of the obese range on the chart can have on the general health of the body.

I'm not so sure that "fashionably thin" is the healthiest way to be. But I'm not a doctor. I have a good one, though. She says I’m just fine.

Paying even the reduced price for the drugs that the current occupant of the White House negotiated in exchange for quicker approval of the drugs, means that you are paying a price to a corporation in order to make the state of your body conform to some kind of otherwise impossible-to-maintain ideal.

There's something wrong about that. Opiates and alcohol are addictive. Weight-loss drugs don’t seem to be, but the psychological toll that stopping them and regaining lost weight seems enormous.

And what if there has not been enough research done of the long-term effects of putting a chemical into your body?

New Issues of Ravel Pavane for Viola and Piano and Smyth Bonny Sweet Robin at IMC

I worked very hard to maintain the original spirit, markings, and voicing that Maurice Ravel used in the 1899 piece he wrote for solo piano. It took a great deal of thought to make it work, and I am pleased with the "viola-ness" of the result.

Dame Ethel Smyth wrote a handful of chamber music pieces while she was in Germany but spent the bulk of her career in England writing large-scale works. She returned to chamber music in her late 60s, and her Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin for flute, oboe, and piano, which she completed in 1927, is one of her last works. Smyth’s hearing started to deteriorate during her 60s, and by her 75th birthday she had become completely deaf.

The popular sixteenth-century melody “Bonny Sweet Robin” is also known as “My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone.” Variations on it by Giles Farnaby and John Munday appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. It is referred to as “Ophelia’s Song” because the character of Ophelia sings “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” during what Laertes calls her “document in madness” in Act 4, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The text of the original song has been lost, but scholars believe “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” is the last line of “Bonny Sweet Robin.”

Johannes Brahms, who liked to characterize people as orchestral instruments, called Ethel Smyth “the oboe.” Whether it was because of her piercing personality or the pitch and resonance of her voice, we will never know. But we do know that Smyth chose to write this late piece for the oboe.

The precedent for substituting a violin or a viola for the oboe involves “Two Interlinked French Folk Melodies,” another piece set for flute, oboe, and piano that Smyth wrote around the same time. The first performance of that piece was given with a violinist playing the oboe part. This edition comes with violin and viola versions of the oboe part (which is why they asked me to edit it).

You can find the music by way of the International Music Company's New Issues page here.

Milkweed

Musical Assumptions encounters Popular Culture: 6 7

A few years ago I wrote a book of shifting pieces (in versions for both violin and viola) called "Dancing on the Fingerboard," where I gave the ultimate piece, which uses sixth and seventh positions, a title that I thought quite appropriate for both the physical matter of navigating high up on the fingerboard, and the musical "sense" of the piece.

Who knew that the numbers involved here would be the stuff of popular culture?

Second Acts

 Bravo to Lisa Hirsch for this excellent article!

Oat-Cranberry-Walnut Muffins

I love having oats soaked overnight with cranberries for breakfast. I add walnuts in the morning, and eat it with some Greek yogurt. But this past weekend, when I went out of town to play a Beethoven program (the Prometheus Overture, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Ninth Symphony) I needed to do something with my Sunday morning portion of oats sitting in the fridge (I make three day's worth at a time in a mason jar). The hotel I was staying in didn't have breakfast, so I decided, in willy-nilly style, to make some muffins with the mixture.

The muffins turned out great, so, while I still remembered what I did, I wrote it down.

It's kind of like improvising and then composing, I guess. But you get to eat the results.

Here's the recipe:

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put paper liners in a muffin tin (the recipe makes nine muffins).

In a 2-cup glass measuring cup combine

1 and 1/4 cups rolled oats and 1/2 cup dried cranberries. 

Cover the mixture with water (you will need to stir it a bit).

Add one egg, 1/4 cup oil (I used avacado oil) and 1/4 cup sugar. Mix it up. It should come out to the 2-cup line, because the oats absorb lots of the liquid. The above picture is a bit deceptive. The measuring cup is indeed full.

In a mixing bowl combine

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Pour the wet mixture into the dry, and mix. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tins, and bake for twenty minutes.

Take the muffins out of the oven, and let them sit in their tin for ten minutes. Then remove the muffins to a rack to cool.

I had such a wonderful time playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and I imagine that I will always associate the experience with these muffins. I'm also planning to make them to share with my whole family at Thanksgiving, but I will need to double the recipe.

The muffins are not that sweet, so if you like sweeter muffins you can add a bit more sugar, or sprinkle some on the top before baking them. And I always like to use cane sugar (the kind with larger caramel-colored crystals) when I bake.

And if you don't have dried cranberries, whole cranberry sauce (half a can if you are making one recipe, and a whole can if you are doubling it) would be great. I made my original muffins with prepared sweetened cranberry sauce (thus eliminating the need, for me, to have more sugar than 1/4 cup in the recipe).

NB: If you really want to make a full tin of muffins, you can always add more cranberries and more oats. I think that the liquid ingredients can stay the same, though.

NB2: Or have a muffin with a piece of 70% dark chocolate! Fantastic!

Hooked on Sonics

A great pun, and a great article (with wonderful illustrations) over in the Public Domain Review.

Hooked on Sonics: Experimenting with Sound in 19th Century Popular Science

WTC, Einmal anders

Years (or maybe decades) ago I imported a bunch of CDs to my computer so I could load them onto an iPod and listen while I walked. At some point I must have imported them to a very old iPhone before iTunes became Apple Music, which is now "pay for play." I haven't become a subscriber to any music services because they don't organize music in a way that I can use it. Each movement of each piece, for example, is a "song," and each performer is an "artist." 

It works perfectly well for a lot of people, but, call me either old or fuddy-duddy, it doesn't work well enough for me to justify the monthly expense.

After poking around the Apple Music app on my phone in the Bach to see what I could play (somehow an automatic "composer" organizing system must have put all the Bach together), and having lost the piece I was listening to due to a fumble in my pocket, I accidentally came upon Sviatoslav Richter's recording of the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier. What a treat (I thought) to bring on today's walk.

After having temperatures in the 80s until yesterday's rain (the first rain in months), today was cold. I had a coat, a hat, and gloves on. The wind was strong, but it always managed to be at our back. The sky was blue, the leaves had suddenly turned yellow, and I was listening to a Bach fugue with new ears because I had developed enough as a pianist since the last time I listened to this recording to actually know the territory, landscape, and physicality of the fugue that Richter was playing (the C major Fugue from Book One).

But wait! The C major Fugue was followed by the second fugue, and then the third. I started to understand what was happening. I have never listened to the WTC as a series of fugues before. Our walk lasted through all the fugues of Book One, and then, informed by the alphabet, I guess, started on the preludes (beginning with the C major) while I was rolling the trash can to the "curb" (we don't have a sidewalk, so there is no curb--just the spot where the driveway, the front lawn, and the street meet.

In Praise of The Day

In case of rain I used sharpie and crayon on canvas.

UPDATE: It did rain, and the sign served beautifully. The rain even washed away a few stray pencil marks that I could not remove with an eraser.

There were 600 people of all ages demonstrating, and the majority of the cars driving by were waving flags, giving a "thumbs up," and honking to signify their approval.

It was gratifying to be part of this world-wide peaceful protest.

No Return: A Recording Made by Cellist Katja Zakotnik

I am happy to share wonderful news! The German cellist Katja Zakotnik has included a fantastic performance of my Sephardic Suite on her EP "No Return."

You can listen on Apple Music here, and on Spotify here.

The Prize and Price of Peace

We all really need the example of María Corina Machado in order to alter the path that this assault of authoritarianism is taking. It gives me hope to know that people everywhere who need to devise ways of working for democracy will be able to learn from her efforts.

The price of peace is very high. We have to work at it all the time.

I was disappointed when she told a person who believed he should have gotten the prize that she was accepting it in honor of him, but after some reflection I think that by doing so she might have, as women so often do in families, simply being a peacemaker. Smart women have been known to sacrifice their egos for a greater good.

And I have a feeling that we might see safer waters for fishing boats, at least for a while.

Elizabeth Roberts, Harlequin Extrordinaire

Elizabeth Roberts, the principal bassoonist of the Charlotteville Symphony and the bassoon professor at the University of Virginia gave a great performance of my Harelquin Sonata this afternoon. The video below should start right before the piece does (about 48 minutes in), but there is no reason that you shouldn't watch and listen to the rest of the program as well. What an excellent bassoonist and contrabassoonist she is!

Art and Craft

Christopher Gordon Forbes, in old blogosphere style, poses a daily question on his Contemporary Composers Collective page on Facebook.

Today’s question was a good one:

How much do you view yourself as an artist, and how much as a craftsperson? Is there a distinction between the two?

I enjoyed answering it there, and am happy that I can share it here.

Without craft there is no art. I think of craft as the “how,” and whatever happens when a human being interacts with whatever I do as an answer to a “why.” Maybe that’s the art part, but it has very little to do with me, unless I happen to be the person who is expressing herself through a piece I happen to have written.  If I don’t get the “craft” right, that possibility for expression is not as clear as I might have hoped. And without expression (of something) I don’t believe there is art.

Jonathan Brodie, Guest Blogger

From his substack "Adventures in the Clef Trade"

In memory of Abraham Chavez

And the music played on and the mercury just went higher

It’s just the vertical expression of horizontal desire . . .

[The Bellamy Brothers]

Why not go both horizontal and vertical at the same time? But where is it possible to do that? Try a string quartet. Take a seat with your buddies and play through the second violin or viola part. Preferably Franz Joseph Haydn because who else? Even though you are sitting down, the middle voice gives you the illusion, no…the realisation that you are simultaneously standing tall and pushing your feet down into the floor. You hear what’s up and know what’s down. That takes care of the vertical. Now you are able to take a peek over the music stand and see the first violinist holding close in the hollow of the box all manner of tuneful stuff while your feet feel the shakes of the cellist offering the solace of fundamental things. So where’s the horizontal? Here: you are spread flat and and thin in between two upscale neighborhoods; while peering from this middle place you are moving your eyes across the page of your music from left to right. It was type-set that way by a 19th century typesetter in Danzig or Vienna on that old and patched Peters Edition. You are in two different places at the same time; and I don’t mean East St. Louis and rural Moline. Illinois.

In the midst of a string quartet is the place to be. Forget Moline.

But let’s go back to Boulder, Colorado. That is where, in 1975 at my University, I encountered for the first time the happy business of being inside such an ensemble and to play a middle voice. The group consisted of three Graces and had conveniently just lost their violist as “Four Graces” doesn’t sound right. What led the temporary trio to invite me, a scattered and undisciplined violin student, to fill the position? I will never know. The invitation was accepted immediately if not sooner. Apparently, if properly motivated, I could put my aleatoric meanderings aside and find the center. It took me less than a day to pretend to read the alto clef more or less accurately. The motivation for this education had nothing to do with gaining more musical perspective and everything to do with the social embellishments of the ensemble that issued the invitation.

A perfect-accuracy reading score in the new clef used by violists wasn’t in the cards. This was because instead of figuring out the actual pitches notated on the page and then calculating where those notes were to be found on the fingerboard, I resorted to a foolish transposing method that frequently, but not always, worked. It should be described here just in case a violinist asked to play viola is tempted to try such a dubious method of learning alto clef. Maybe describing it will alert the potential victim to sniff out the dangers found on such a sketchy street. My advice is to take a little extra time and know the names of the notes you are playing. Don’t use the following tactic:

Even though you are holding a viola, pretend you are still playing your violin and still reading treble clef. Then place your finger two whole steps lower than the note under consideration, and sound the note. Be sure to have a look of serenity and wisdom that comes sooner and usually later comes to the face of all violists. To some, after they are dead.

My problem in those days was that I was so constantly distracted by the strangeness and exoticness of the world around me that I found it difficult to learn new things. Everything was remarkably peculiar or radiant. Sometimes both at the same time. All I could do was witness. My new string quartet was working on Beethoven’s charming Opus 18. No. 4, but the charm of my colleagues interfered with my being able to fulfil my charge; to express competently and expressively the manifold charms of the Beethoven while staying at least approximately in tune. The impediment to reaching this standard happened mostly because my attention and priorities lay elsewhere. Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s words describe my state of mind exactly. To work on Opus 18 with those musicians was like working “with the first plough in the childhood of the world.” I was so stunned by the ambiance of the situation that I couldn’t concentrate on being a musician. All I could do was luxuriate in the warmth of the new-found land where miraculously and unaccountably, I found myself. I was a tourist, not a music-maker.

It was no better with my violin lessons. My teacher was the extraordinary Abraham Chavez. His musical abilities were profound. He could transpose unaccompanied Bach sonatas and partitas into any key at a moment’s notice without benefit of the score. His solfege skills were unexcelled. When asked to whistle any snippet presented to him from the score that lay on his desk and he would do so with pitch-perfect accuracy. During my lessons he would demonstrate passages from the music I was studying while holding a lit cigarette in his right hand. When he moved the hair of his bow from the tip to the base of the stick, his unfiltered Camel would briefly be positioned over the exquisitely formed f-holes of his Stradivarius. How could I take in his musicianship and pedagogical insights when my principal preoccupation was wondering if burning ash would fall onto the top of that rare instrument and then through the sound holes into the sacred interior.

When unhappy with the sloppiness of the University Orchestra’s rendering of the opening bars of The Marriage of Figaro Overture, this Magus played the passage impeccably, to show how it should be done. Perched on his tall three-legged stool in front of the ensemble, he first played it on violin, followed by viola, then cello. This last instrument was hard to hold while he sat on his high stool. He held the cello with his legs, the sharp point of end-pin jutting out crazily towards the orchestra like a weapon but not interfering with the dexterity of the fingers of his left hand. The message implied by the awkward position of the cello’s endpin was not lost on the orchestra. We were a perceptive bunch.

But he wasn’t finished. He left the podium and went to the bass section and played. And then the woodwind section, where the bassoon was, and rendered the notes expressively on that instrument as well. That was it. Mozart hadn’t scored the passage for any other instruments. But had the Marimba been part of the orchestration of the passage, it was certain that this conductor would have nailed it on the wooden keys.

How could I learn from Abraham Chavez? All I could do was gawk and wonder.

Occasionally his actions percolated into the mystic. Hanging from the chain on his neck were several emblems that revealed that, beyond music. he was walking an esoteric path. Most prominent of these emblems was the Rose Cross and a Magan David to show that he was both a Rosicrucian and a Marrano. Why be one when you can be both? Once a bass student, confused about the time of his orchestra try-out, showed up during my lesson time. Welcomed to audition then and there, he asked what he should play; an excerpt from the repertoire, a scale, or solo. Professor Chavez told him there was no need to play anything. He removed a pendulum that was housed in the vicinity of the Rose Cross and Six-pointed Star and dangled it in front of the astonished candidate. It moved clockwise. “You’re in” said Professor Chavez. My lesson then continued, but I remember none of it. To this day I recall nothing Abraham Chavez taught me that day. That lacunae applies to the totality of the lessons I took with him. This failure to learn is on me. The virtuosity blinded me. I didn’t have the strength to pick up at least a few glittering shards that my teacher was offering.

There was still something else that got in the way. I sensed that to better hold and replicate the graceful violinistic motions this artist was teaching, I had to become a convert to an obscure, almost unrevealed knowledge. Alas that an innate skepticism prevented me from becoming an initiate. Had I thrown aside suspicion and entered the temple, I could have learned more and become a better violin player. Instead of entering, I tried to look but vapours from the burning stick took the shape of a knotty curtain that hid what was behind.

My teacher’s knowledge was obscured by what I was able to see: a pebble slowly moving; and then smoke drifting vertically and horizontally until it became a whirlwind rotating counter-clockwise.

Happy Anniversary #41 to us!

[Drawn by our son Ben for our 40th anniversary]

Michael posted a view from the front on his blog today.

Audience for Classical Music in 2025

A person with a microphone and a video camera standing a few yards away from a Toronto concert hall posed the question, "Why it is so difficult for everyday people to just go in and enjoy a classical concert?" to two young women.

Here is my edited transcription of what the first person said:

“I know for me when you think about classical music you tend to think about a white demographic. I feel that people won't see it's catered to them in a specific way. But I feel like it's not very welcoming in that space, like people just think, it's not for me, it's not catered to me, or maybe it's not sounds specifically that they're looking for.  But it is something you don't really think about right away, like that's a space that I can go in and just like be seen, and then enjoy with my friends.”

The second person agreed with her friend, and added that there wasn't a feeling of access, and that classical music was only for a certain group of people. She said that it lacked visibility, and that it should be advertised so that it could be "really out there."

While the institutions and organizations that prepare and present concerts have evolved a great deal to become more inclusive, and have gone out of their way to use social media to reach people during the past couple of decades, I fear that the attitude of young adults not exposed to classical music in childhood (for whatever reason) might be stuck in the past.

I have written many blogposts about the audience for classical music over the years on this blog (you can read them through this link). Some posts might be relevant in the context of this post, and some might not be that relevant.

Let’s hope that we continue to remember the strides we have made, and can continue to let young people know that their engagement is really welcome.

Pain

I kind of overdid it practicing viola over the past few days. After all the comfortable violin playing I have been doing over the summer, the reality of orchestral obligations has gotten me back into viola practice. And the most immediate chanllenges involve complicated passages that involve a lot of crossing between the C string and the G string.

This means that the repetitive lifting of my right arm at angles I am not used to has caused some muscle strain. So I have had to be careful, and I have had to be efficient in my practicing.

I came across this article today about how musicians feel pain differently from people who aren't musicians, and thought I would share it here.

I always thought that musicians are able to withstand a certain amount of pain because the pleasure of playing and the pleasure of the music produced endorphins. But this study involves the way the act of playing music reshapes our brains.

Power, Anger, Music, and Women

Yesterday I heard myself say (out loud) that I was angry. Anger is not one of the expressions that I habitually practice, and before yesterday it was an expression that I allowed myself to experience silently. It threw me for a loop. I lost sleep. And I am still thinking about it.

In the wee hours of the morning I started searching for poems concerning anger written by women (public domain poems, naturally) that I could consider setting to music, and though I found poems that were cynical, witty, biting, clever, or self-deprecating, I couldn't find a poem that had either the need for music or the room for it.

Twenty-five or so years ago, when I wrote my Snow Queen opera (based on the Hans Christian Andersen story), I had to create a motivation for the Snow Queen's malevolence. The Snow Queen, who I named after the goddes Skadi, from Norse Mythology, sings this aria to express her anger.

I adapted the text from a poem by Elmer Diktonius.

Skadi was a giant, an all-powerful goddess of Norse Mythology. In order to avenge the death of her father, she was allowed to choose a husband from among the gods, but she was forced to choose her husband with a scarf tied around her eyes so she could only see his feet. Skadi picked the god with the nicest feet, thinking he was Baldr, the handsomest of the gods, but the nicest feet unfortunately belonged to Njord, the god of the sea coast.

Their marriage was short and unhappy. This aria suggests lonlieness as Skadi's motivation for abducting an innocent boy, and the boy, named Kay, is attracted to the Skadi because a sliver of glass from a goblin's mirror that is lodged in his eye makes everything beautiful look ugly, and everything ugly look appealing. Another sliver of mirror glass that pierced Kay's heart is slowly turning it into a lump of ice.

Skadi's anger is also a result of her powerlessness in a male-dominated society that had little need for women.

Lack of power for mortal (and real) women happens at home, at work, and in social organizations (religious, civic, educational, and arts-related). It was prevalent when I was a child, it was there when our children were children, and it is still firmly in place, even in situations when there are a large number of smart, outspoken, and capable women.

One of the reasons I love writing music is that I have ultimate power over every note I write. It is a great feeling of accomplishment to get them to behave the way I want them to, and then to sit back and know that I did the best that I could do within the confines of my "canvas." (I am sure I am not alone in my experience.)

I am not angry about the fact that what I write might not mean much of anything to the majority of people. I am not angry about the fact that some musicians don't care for the music I write. And I don't harbor anger about the auditions I have lost (in my flute-playing days), or the rejections I have gotten from "calls for scores." Music is not an angry space for me, which is one reason why I find solace, freedom, and stimulation from practicing it, performing it, and writing it. 

But when I see and hear anger coming from the mouths of elected and non-elected officials on the television directed at professional people who ask necessary questions, it sends me into a very dark place.

Nobody likes being yelled at. I have been berated, insulted, criticized, and belittled by a handful of people during my six and a half decades of life, and each time left what feels like a permanent mark on my spirit. I can't recall a single time when I expressed loud anger directly at someone for something that they did to me. I have cut off contact with people who have offended me or members of my family. And I have turned anger inward.

Now that I have voiced my anger, and now that I have written this post, I'm hoping for some smoother sailing through the anger-saturated landscape we are facing. I have looked anger in the face, and am hoping that recognizing and expounding upon my relationship with anger might help me to navigate through the rough waters that are all around us and ahead of all of us here on the Earth.

Adventures in the musical stratosphere

Yesterday one of my violin students, who is also a flutist (there have been quite a few over the years), brought his brand-new wooden piccolo to his lesson. It arrived in the mail while he was in school, and his mother wanted to give it to him right away.

I looked it over, and told him that it looked good (it was from eBay). We went back into thinking about the violin. 

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about how the piccolo might sound. I couldn’t resist it any longer, and asked my student if I could try the piccolo. 

The night before I played viola in a rehearsal of Beethoven Ninth Symphony where I fondly reflected on the pinnacle of my piccolo career: playing piccolo in Beethoven’s Ninth at Carnegie Hall in the early 1980s. I haven’t held a piccolo in my hands since the very early 1990s, when my piccolo went to play in the Detroit Symphony, and I used the money from the sale to buy a violin bow.

So I naturally played the piccolo part of the Beethoven (the march in the last movement). It was thrilling to play. I found my student’s eBay piccolo without a brand name to be just as good as my former Powell. 

Then we went back to our lesson. My left ear hurt a bit after indulging in the joys of the very highest and loudest areas of the musical spectrum. I know that my path to violin, viola, and composition is not only the right path for me, but the more healthy path.

I hope my student gets a lot of joy from playing this sweet instrument.

Just because I can . . .

Instead of making a version of the two William Carlos Williams songs I finished the other day for soprano and piano, I decided to make a version of them for violin and piano to play on my new violin in celebration of its rich and resonant high register. 

You can find the music here and on this page of the IMSLP. You can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Is it darkest just before the dawn?

In 2013 I finished the first of two songs I wanted to set to poems by William Carlos Williams.  Today I finished the second song, making this musical interval between daybreak and dawn about twelve years. After finishing "Daybreak," I wrote the opening measures of "Dawn," but I abandoned the idea of having a set of both songs because I didn't know where to go with it beyond the opening. Now, perhaps inspired by the need for some light during these dark nights of the soul (which are turning into dark months of the soul) that we are all experiencing, I put my head down and plowed forward.

Musical victories may be meaningless to most people, but they are victories to me.

Daybreak

Half a moon is flaming in the south below clear little stars.
Vague shapes begin to stir among
the yellow-poppy street lamps.
Oblique masses of purple and black
lift themselves. Is it earth or sky?
It is the beginning! —again?
Answer, answer! Huntress who spreadest
vitreous dawn before dawn!

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—! lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
songs cease.

I made a post with links to the music on my thematic catalog blog. But, if you like, you can read the poetry and listen to some computer-generated recordings here:

Daybreak
Dawn

Four States of Bean Lunch

It is rare that I have beans in four states available for lunch!

We have mung bean sprouts, raw French green beans, and braised tofu in the bowl. I ate them with a dressing made with tahini, rice vinegar (equal amounts, mixed together until they form a paste) soy sauce (another state of bean!), and a splash of water.

The hummus on the rye cracker is a blend of soaked, sprouted, and cooked chickpeas (sprouted just a tad), garlic flowers from the garden, parsley from the windowsill, fresh lemon juice, sesame tahini, salt, and black pepper.

I had the same lunch yesterday, but I neglected to take a picture.

With all that is going on in the world, I feel that a break for a lunch post is necessary. And now it's time to take a walk on this glorious September day, and tonight I get to play a Haydn String Quartet (the Kaiser, Opus 76 No. 3).

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Competition

After our journey into the world of Coleridge, and after reading a little about his relationship with William Wordsworth, I wondered if there might have been a film made about it. My suspicions proved correct, and I found this film from 2001 very satisfying in many ways.

The writers took liberties when filling in possible sub-plots, and they went back and forth in time a bit much for my taste. But the acting is excellent, the poetry extremely well read, the music (all original) is appropriate for both the time and the place, the visual effects and general cinematography are stimulating and imaginative, and the props (always important for me) felt authentic (unlike period films that look like advertisements in a Pottery Barn catalog). It wasn't easy to find this on YouTube, but here it is.



I suppose that I reacted quite strongly to the character of William Wordsworth because he was portrayed as an extremely competitive person who had a sister, who, by the dictates of society, had to express herself by helping her brother succeed. She wouldn't have thought for a moment to try to compete with her brother.

I like to think that when I was born I was delivered with a "non-compete" clause. My older brother Marshall, who identified a great deal with Wordsworth and his poetry, was competition personafied.

I couldn't compete with Marshall, who had the most absolute form of perfect pitch, though he insisted on competing with me.

I tried my hand at competition outside of the family as a child: trying to be the first to complete the SRA (reading) cards, taking my seating in all-city orchestra as an evaluation of my violin playing, and counting the lines I had in school plays as a way of gauging how important my part (and therefore I) was. I have since learned that there are no small parts, only small actors, and that where you sit in orchestra has no reflection on the quality of your playing.

After getting into Juilliard through what I considered the back door (see the post about doing a color trick to manipulate my teacher, and add to it the fact that Julius Baker taught my mother, and that my father was the principal violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), and never being among the students who did the necesary things to be noticed (giving the impression of being something special by talking a good game and associating with "important" people), I turned inward and tended to my own musical garden, which had its rewards in sound, knowledge, and expression.

I don't do the aggressive promotional stuff that composers and performing musicians do on the internets because I do not have the taste or the skills for business. I have come to realize, however, that it might have more to do with the fact that I have a serious distaste for competition.

Competing for visibility by feeding an algorithm is kind of like counting lines in a play to me. Comparing my playing or writing to someone in a professional position that could be considered "above" mine is also a complete waste of time. 

I value the ability to "say" what I feel is true in music, and am so glad that I can continue to grow, even at this advanced stage of a life devoted to under-employment.

I hope you enjoy the movie, and I hope you find yourself exploring Coleridge's poetry. And Wordsworth's as well. 

Coleridge's "The Nightingale"

When Michael and I read poetry in our two-person reading club, we like to read it aloud. Today was the first time either Michael or I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale," and we both enjoyed it tremendously. 

It struck me, while reading this poem about a bird doing its best to get its thoughts and feelings out while there is time to do so (and, of course, about so much more), that there is a marked difference between reading poetry out loud by yourself and reading poetry out loud to (and with) someone else.

It is not unlike the way playing music by yourself feels different from playing music when someone is listening to you play.

Michael and I are reading our way through the eighty volumes of the "Penguin Little Black Classics." They are small books (around fifty pages long) filled with texts that are in the public domain (some that we might otherwise not have chosen to read). It has been a great adventure in many ways, including an adventure in the documented need for human proofreaders to make sure the names of the writers are spelled correctly on the covers.

Here's case in point:

Michael has a photo of the typo on the cover of the Thomas Nashe volume of the set in this blog post.

Hot Flash!

It is certainly not news to anyone who knows me or plays with me that I am in a perpetual state of thermal challenge. When I was in my fifties it was particularly difficult to handle. For a while there (which might have been a few years) they happened every twenty minutes, practically around the clock.

Concerts were a serious problem, since hot flashes also tend to put me in a state of momentary panic. It was always a win for me when the timing worked out right, and I only flashed during a period of rest or during a break between pieces. I have learned ways to cope. I have had no choice. And, thankfully, when I flash while playing, I no longer panic.

One of the most interesting benefits of playing my new (old) fiddle is that I connect imediately and deeply to the essence of the music I am playing, particularly when it is Haydn or Bach, and particularly when I use an 18th-century bow. When playing this instrument I find myself flashing more often than usual, particularly when I am in the, pardon the expression, heat, of understanding a phrase or passage in a new way.

This new instrument provides a window into harmonic stuff in music I have played for decades that I have simply never been privy to before. So I welcome those flashes of understanding. 

I like to think of the age of flashing as the age of wisdom for women. Harmony is more exciting to me now than it was when I was younger. And I feel like I can hear more counterpoint, and can better appreciate how phrases work within the forms used in the Classical Period.

And what a relief it is to be at a point in my life where I can judge the quality of my work (as both a composer and as a player) myself. My sense of self worth is not based on how I am judged by others. It does make me very happy to play music with friends and colleagues, and it certainly makes me happy when people enjoy playing music I have written, particularly when playing it helps stimulate imagination and musical engagement.

Unique Musical Voices

Michael shared a video of a commercial from the 1960s with me (for reasons I do not need to discuss here), and I immediately recognized Julius Baker's flute playing in the soundtrack. It was as clear to me as it would have been if it had been his speaking voice, a voice I haven't heard for a couple of decades.

I came of flute-playing age in a world where everyone was trying to sound like Julius Baker. My teacher and his generation of Baker students had successfully "cloned" what people referred to as "the Baker sound." People even referred to his students as coming "out of the Bakery."

I started that way too. I prepared for my Juilliard audition by listening very carefully to a recording of Julius Baker playing the slow movement of a Mozart concerto, and made a little mark every time he changed color. During my audition I changed either my tone color or my dynamic to something different from what I had been doing at crucial points. I guess it worked. He took me as a student.

Julius Baker taught by example. He phrased by instinct, while playing the notes exactly as written with excellent rhythm, excellent intonation, and a beautiful sound in every register and every dynamic. He never talked about musical structure, physical form, support, or breathing. 

His secret to teaching was being able to pick students he thought would be successful. He loved being surrounded with adoring students, and was particularly impressed with the ones who could play the piano, as well as the ones who were attractive. He valued appearances, and encouraged me to dress better than I did. He was right: people judge female flutists by how they look. I had no clue how to dress.

Julius Baker was a beekeeper who lived with his wife and children on a small farm (Baker’s Acres) growing mostly wildflowers for the bees. He learned to weld from his hospital roommate (he was there recovering from a heart attack). He jogged every morning, and encouraged his students to do the same. He was a ham radio operator, and communicated with people all over the world. During the late 1940s and mid 1950s he had his own recording company (The Oxford Recording Company). I saw the library of recordings in his basement. I believe he was also a pilot.

He wasn't much of a reader, except of the newspaper, and someone told me that he was kind of a genius with the stock market.

Julius Baker's first instrument was the violin, but he found more success as a flutist (his father was a flutist--and they wrote letters to one another in Yiddish after he left home for Eastman). He told me that the reason he went into music was so that he could get an education. He was a unique human being who was respected and adored by his colleagues, at least from what I saw. He loved being "a regular guy," and would (and did) start conversations with anyone about anything. 

Julius Baker’s favorite musicians were Jascha Heifetz, David Nadien, and Emil Gilels. He found ways to make the flute sound like a violin (a passion that I shared with him), and he could blend with any instrument in the orchestra. He had an array of colors on the flute including some that were kind of brassy and buzzy in the low register, and had a beautiful rolling vibrato that, unlike other flutists of the time, involved the whole air column (like the vibrato of a singer) and not the mouth and throat (you can listen to John Wummer for an example of that). I can’t stand listening to Wummer, who, as the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic,  represented the state of the art before Baker.

While I was in my twenties you could hear the Baker Sound in the flute sections of every American orchestra, and also in orchestras all over the world. But during the last decade of the twentieth century flute playing took several post-Baker turns. 

One big factor was that instruments improved. During the Baker era there were basically two great American flute makers: Haynes and Powell. Then there were spinoff companies like Brannon (my Powell flute was made by Bickford Brannon before he started his own company) that made all kinds of improvements. Japanese companies started making flutes that were easier to play, and spoke particularly well in the low register (so there wasn't a need to buzz). 

Along with physical improvements to the instrument, excellent teachers of the post-Baker generation found new ways to teach, and a lot of new repertoire appeared involving the whole flute family. Suddenly flute players had an enticing array of musical and intellectual challenges.

Flutists (and all musicians) have been able to record themselves easily, as part of regular practice, for half a century. We can slow recordings down and scrub messy passages clean through careful practice. We can even look at images of the sound waves on our phones, and work on the contours to make everything sound perfect. Clean playing that is perfectly in tune and in perfect rhythm wins auditions, and a conservatory education is all about teaching students to win auditions.

I have heard some of that audition-winning clean-as-a-whistle flute playing in person, and have certainly been impressed. The current generation of teachers working in colleges and conservatories (people who began teaching in the twenty-first century) have done an excellent job at training highly capable flutists.

But I doubt that I would be able to distinguish the unique voice of one pristine flute player from this generation of flutists in their twenties from another from behind a screen or on a recording. And there is something kind of sad about that.