March is the Coolest Month

For a quarter of a century I have spent the months leading up to March practicing music for recital progams devoted exclusively to music written by women. At the beginning of the twenty-first century (and back into the twentieth century) the very idea that women could write music as well as men could write music was an exotic and sometimes subversive thought. Those of us who have played music written by women knew (and know) that gender has nothing to do with quality when it comes to composition. And those of us who have spent their musical lives trying to prove that point have learned, sometimes the hard way, that public perception and, by extension, public awareness is really important.

You can read my musings on the subject here. The posts go back to 2007, so make sure to click on "older posts" at the bottom of each page to see everything this link has to show. I have tried to do my part to increase public awareness.

The pianist with whom I played Women’s History and Awareness Month recitals for years is no longer performing, but I can still enjoy the fact that a great many musicians around the world are now giving concerts in March devoted exclusively to music written by women. Many find the months leading up to March as an opportunity to expand their repertoire by learning new works by living women, and some think of it as an opportunity to study and perform music by women who are no longer living.

The State University of New York at Fredonia hosts a database that offers detailed searches to help find such music.

March is particularly fun for me these days because musicians from all over the world send me email messages to let me know that they are playing something I wrote, often on a concert in March that is dedicated to music written by women. Some people ask for information to use for program notes, and some people send pre-performances recordings and ask for feeback. I have also enjoyed spending time on Zoom calls with students who are preparing performances of pieces I have written. Having a coaching session with living composer be just a phone call away is something I never could have imagined during my student days.

A remarkable thing about this gender-specific expansion of repertoire is that there seems to be a concurrent movement towards accepting the idea that well-written new music does not have to sound difficult, complicated, dense, noisy, or academic in order to be worth listening to or performing.

Michael Tilson Thomas, Guest Blogger

I had the chance to work with Michael Tilson Thomas at the very beginning of his career. I was ten or eleven, and he was the assistant conductor in charge of conducting the children's chorus during an unstaged performance of Alban Berg's Wozzeck at Tanglewood.

Then, when I was fourteen I got to sing in a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance he directed of Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum and his Symphony of Psalms, along with a bunch of double choir pieces by Gabrieli and Schutz.

And now, nearing the end of his life, I still think of him as the young man I first knew (a young grown-up, because I was a young kid), even though he has made such a huge impact on the musical world since his years in Boston.

I found this Facebook post he made the other day, and for the benefit of those who are not on Facebook, I will share it here:

Dear Friends,

Three years ago, I wrote to tell you that I’m battling Glioblastoma. The three and a half years since the initial diagnosis have been a special time in my life, filled with friends, family, and music. They have also been challenging, as I had to undergo a second operation and manage complications from the treatments that have held the tumor at bay.

My doctors have informed me that the tumor has returned. We continue to work with the superb group at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center. There are treatment options, but the odds are uncertain.

Joshua and I are in San Francisco with the pups, and we take occasional jaunts to Bolinas. Our home is filled with memories of a full life. There’s a keyboard on each floor and occasionally a piece by CPE Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, a Broadway melody, or one of my own tunes seem to emerge. Sometimes I can share these moments. Other times I find my own personal peace and solace.

Now is the time to wind down my public appearances. During the past year, I had the opportunity to come full circle with musicians and orchestras I hold most dear. My work with the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic was very special. In March, I have concerts planned with the New World Symphony and, on April 26, the San Francisco Symphony is celebrating my 80th birthday. At that point, we all get to say the old show business expression, “It’s a wrap.”

A “coda” is a musical element at the end of a composition that brings the whole piece to a conclusion. A coda can vary greatly in length. My life’s coda is generous and rich.

Life is precious.

— MTT

My Normal Day

I spent the past two days in Normal, Illinois at the Wonsook Kim College of Fine arts at Illinois State University working with Katherine Lewis's viola class. Dr. Lewis created a class project for her students to choose pieces by a single living composer, and perform them in a concert.

And I am so honored that she chose me.

It takes under two hours to drive to Normal, so I was able to get to hear the all the students play before the performance. On Monday afternoon I got to hear the entire class play ensemble pieces, and on Tuesday morning before the concert I got to work with students individually.  Fortunately there was nothing about viola playing that I had to address because of Dr. Lewis's superb teaching, so it was all about the music.

It was overwhelming to me to see and hear how seriously these young people (freshmen through graduate students) take their work, and how much they care about one another and support one another.

Their concert was all about the music. I felt myself becoming invisible in the very best way, because as a composer I had done my job (and in this case for an instrument that I know most intimately) and the music could flow the way it wanted to flow through the hands, arms, ears, and hearts of young musicians I had only just met, who enjoyed the opportunity of playing for a composer.

I spent a great deal of time and took a great deal of care (over the years) to provide detailed "maps" that can lead to deep musical expression. Seeing and hearing that a "map" is trustworthy means everything to me. Hearing an hour-long concert is overwhelming.

I do my work in relative isolation, and though I make it available, and do my best to let people know about it, I do it to please myself. But what a joy it is to find that in putting together pieces that help me express myself, I have managed to write a body of music that has meaning to a whole class of young violists, and the people in the audience they played it for yesterday.

 

Nathan Groot's Viola Menagerie

What a treat to have a surprise trip to the musical zoo today (with viola in hand)! I fondly refer these "Advanced Viola Scale Studies" as "Upscale Tales," because the original name I had for the set of books was "Scale Tales." The first book (for violin, but which can also be played at pitch for viola) is entirely in first position, and the advanced book (recorded by Nathan Groot) uses the full range of the instrument. There's one for violin too--same music, same animals, but the animals present themselves in different keys.







You can hear more on this playlist, and learn more about the books by going to this link. Thank you, Nathan!

Leonard Bernstein's Mass

E. Andrew Taylor's excellent article in The Conversation mentions that in 1971 Richard Nixon didn't attend the opening concert held at the Kennedy Center.

The program was Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a completely appropriate piece for the occasion. The piece was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy, and is a theater piece that intersperces parts of the Latin Mass with texts in English and Hebrew that would resonate with a 1970s audience.

The FBI warned Nixon that "anti-war messages encoded in the Latin text might be designed to embarass him."

Encoded?

I wonder if this quote from the excellent Wikipedia article about the piece might have been a problem passage:

The street chorus sings with the Latin lyrics until they hit a line which they twist into a complaint or a self-serving boast; i.e. "dona nobis pacem" (English: "grant us peace") turns into the street chorus, "Give us peace NOW!" In this way, Bernstein interweaves and contrasts social commentary and prayer.

Anyway, Dr. Taylor's article is worth reading from top to toe.

I have deeply enjoyed watching the Kennedy Center Awards program on the television over the years. I particularly remember when Nathan Milstein was honored in 1987. He shared the stage with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Bette Davis. If the website gets "scrubbed" of its really great history (for reasons I hate to have to imagine), you can go to this archived page, scroll to the bottom, and see the list of honorees by year.

This center and these awards have been really meaningful.

As a person who flies very low under the radar of professional musical life (spending most of it either practicing, playing for pleasure--hopefully for the people who might be listening, and definitely for myself and my partners in musical "crime," playing in the viola section, or having written something that allows the person or people playing it to express themselves musically through it), I never thought that current workings of the federal government would work to intrude on and potentially compromise my musical world. But now I have to think about it.

No Kings Day

I got an email message a few days ago from a friend who lives in our town saying that there would be a protest in Charleston at noon today, so Michael and I made some appropriate signs, bundled up, and made our way to the courthouse square (the county seat of Coles County, Illinois).

As our grandchildren would say, "Guess what?"

Nobody was there. Nobody there to protest, and only a small number of cars were parked on the square. It is a holiday, after all, right?

So I offer you photographs of our two signs, which you are welcome to enjoy and share with people in places where people are not sleeping while the world's oldest democracy gets shattered by forces that seem to be beyond our control.

Daniel Morganstern, Guest blogger "A Late Bloomer"

This is a picture of my life-long friend Daniel Morganstern with June DeForest, his wife and chamber music partner. June, who spent her last years dealing with the effects of Parkinson's Disease, died this past October. She was a remarkable person, and I thought I would share Danny's beautiful tribute to her and their life together here. I also put a few links in, because I can.

A Late Bloomer

During her twenties, my wife June always claimed that success would come to her later because she was a late bloomer. She also explained that, before any great event happens, there are always harbingers (leaves and twigs that float up), and this is the way it happened.

In 1974, right after the end of the Lyric opera season, June decided to go back to the Manhattan School of Music and finish up her master’s degree, which she had abandoned in 1963 when she wisely decided to go on tour with the American Ballet Theater. Among other things, she included the Ives Second Violin Sonata on her program, along with the Kodaly Duo. Also included were Tartini’s Variations on a Theme by Corelli and the Brahms D Minor Sonata. I thought she played beautifully, and so did my entire family, but most of all, her teacher, Raphael Bronstein (who had been an assistant to Leopold Auer) who said, “At last, I have a master’s students who really is a master.”

Was it prescience, or just a lucky break, that right after that 1974 master’s recital, we gave a series of three concerts at the Cultural Center in New York? The first two were comprised of Brahms Trios, two Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites, and the Kodaly Duo. At the third concert, we did an all Ives concert consisting of his Piano Trio, Second Violin Sonata, and a few solo piano pieces.

We were rewarded with an invitation from the National Gallery of Art to participate in the hundredth anniversary series of Ives’ birth, for which June was rewarded with a review in the Washington Post, which said her performances were first-rate. This one performance put us on the map as a legitimately important ensemble. At that time, there were only a small number of managers for chamber ensembles like what was to become the American Chamber Trio. June pointed out, after many attempts and rejections to get concerts, that while there were many artists, there were only a few managers. As we found out, every presenter had a better artist or a cheaper artist, and there was no way of convincing them otherwise. 

June took a novel attitude towards the whole situation, saying, “Why shouldn’t WE be a manager and deal with presenters on an equal basis?” And so, with the help of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, the American Chamber Concerts was incorporated. Then, in the persona of Helen Winter, June managed to convince all kinds of people to take us seriously when we played in New York and engage us for concerts all over the country. In the second of our series at Carnegie Recital Hall, June got a wonderful review in The New York Times for the Kodaly Duo: it was acclaimed as, "distinguished by technical polish and keen musical understanding" in The New York Times.

One day, June decided that to be a real violinist, she needed to get a real violin. Maybe not a Stradivarius or a del Gesu, but something of exceptional quality with a pedigree and papers to prove it. The first thing she did was to get the most expensive Jaegar violin case, covered in leather and cushioned in velvet for whatever was the top price at that time. Within three months, on a tour to San Francisco, either June found her violin or her violin found her at the shop of Frank Passa. It was love at first sight, and she played that violin for her entire career.

Another example of June’s prescience was when she decided that she wanted to be a teacher. Before any sign of her getting a job appeared, she took off both the Lyric Opera season and the American Ballet Theater season and started looking in The College Music Society for openings, and she started preparing for auditions. I kept bothering her, “WHY do you want a $15,000 a year job in the middle of Iowa, or worse, Kansas, when you can make so much more money playing at the opera or at the Met with the ballet?” She actually did go down to Florida and auditioned for one of those $15,000 a year jobs, which she didn’t get, but she was prepared. In her fingers, she had the Mendelssohn concerto, the Bach E Major Partita, and the big violin solo from Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. She also prepared a tape of performances we gave on WFMT of the Tchaikovsky trio and the Kodaly Duo. At the last minute, an important job opened up at the College of Wooster in Ohio for a distinguished visiting professor of music. Needless to say, she got it by acclamation, and this became the foundation for a long and successful teaching career.

June’s engaging personality made her many friends. The conductor for all our initial Wagner operas was Ferdinand Leitner, a very famous and well-established authority on the music of Wagner and Strauss. One Christmas, June bought him a beautiful necktie with an inscription on the tie saying that read, “This tie was especially made for Ferdinand Leitner.” Then, she asked him whether he would be willing to her listen to the solo from Ein Heldenleben since he was a friend of Strauss and could give her the word of God. Well, she listened, and she learned, and in doing so elevated the level of her violin playing of that solo considerably.

A similar story was how she went up to David Nadien, legendary concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, after a performance of the Chausson Poeme at ABT where he was the soloist and said, “I really need to improve my playing. Would you teach me?” He said, “Sure, as long as you’re willing to pay the rate I get per hour in the studios.” June always said that Nadien taught her how to think on the violin, and he did it by giving her one concerto after the other with his fingerings. The repertoire he assigned her were always real violin pieces, starting with the Vitali Chaconne and La Folia, and going onto the violin concertos of Viotti, Spohr, and onto the biggies: Mendelssohn, Wieniawski, etc., all the way through to the Barber concerto. June made many friends supplying other violinists with his fingerings and bowings for these major concertos.

June could walk into a room of strangers and walk out in ten minutes with five friends, while I would be hiding in a corner someplace so I didn’t need to deal with anybody I didn’t know. At the 50th reunion of my high school class, June came out with a man named Mark Starr who had been studying conducting with somebody famous in Italy. I went to school with Mark Starr for at least three years and never met him or had any indication that he had any relation to serious music-making. In ten minutes, June had brought him over to me, where he told me he was related to both John Corigliano, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic at the time we were in high school, and to John Corgliano Jr., famous composer of the Ghosts of Versailles and other light classics of the 20th century.

It occurred to me in three years I had no idea that Mark Starr existed, and in ten minutes June brought him over to make serious conversation about conducting, composing, and creating a career.

When Bill Ryden, Editorial Director of International Music, came to Chicago for the Midwest Band Convention, we took him out to lunch at the Russian Teatime. Then, June asked very casually (knowing he was a composer) whether he wrote any piano trios. Three days later, three trios arrived, and we began a long and fruitful relationship that encompassed sixteen of his rags that we recorded, six that we played in Carnegie Hall in New York, three that were published by Ludwig Music, and which we played to great enthusiasm all over the country for the next many years.

John Lane was the Director of Entertainment on the Epirotiki cruise line, and June convinced him to hire us for what ended up being five cruises. Our obligation to Epirotiki was one 45-minute concert per week, and with Epirotiki, we cruised the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from Venice to Odessa and back through the Greek Islands, from Buenos Aries to Rio de Janeiro, from Los Angeles to Vancouver, and various others up to Alaska.

Both Bill Ryden and John Lane came to all our New York concerts, bringing many friends with them. Two incidents that stand out in my mind that characterize June as a friend have to do with her friendship with Julia Markham.

At one point, Julia was beside herself with an apartment cluttered beyond belief, and it was driving her insane. June picked up the phone, called United Airlines and made a reservation, and was with Julia the very next day. She stayed a week to help Julia get everything in order. When Julia died of cancer, June was there to be with her in her last moments. If June was your friend, you had a friend.

One day, at the Metropolitan Opera House, violinist Joe Shorr, former concertmaster of the New York City Opera and the Denver Symphony, knocked the corner off his Guarnerius off. He looked and looked but couldn’t find the corner. June stayed for an hour after the rehearsal and looked for it until she found it and it returned it to Joe.

The biggest commitment June made was to her mother who, at 85, could no longer take care of herself. June moved us from New York to Chicago, against my vehement objections, so that we could have a place big enough for each of our needs. Isobel stayed with us for ten years and took great pride in June’s being a professor at a university.

One of the things that June took the most seriously was teaching the violin. She had no ambitions to go into competition with Almita Vamos or Dorothy DeLay, so her ambitions were not about the aggrandizement of her reputation, but entirely for the students. It didn’t matter to June whether her various students had talent or brains, but she was willing to go the extra mile to get a very sub-standard talent good enough to pass her exam to get her degree. On the other hand, if she did have somebody with talent and could bring them up to a respectable level, she would enter them into the Music Teachers National Association Competition, pay the entrance fee, drive them to the competition, and pay for the pianist.

Five of them represented the state of Indiana, which definitely upgraded their resumes, either going to college or to graduate school. She went out of her way to make friends with important violin teachers in big universities so she could place her students, and they were happy to have her sending students to them who were well-trained and knew what was required. Since June felt that David Nadien had taught her how to think on the violin, she oriented all her teaching to a think-on-the-violin model. Early on, she noticed that the students that came to her were stuck in first position, so she put them into third position, uncomfortable as it must have been, right away. She always had two stands in her studio so that she could see what her students were playing and how and demonstrate how to make it better.

The next item on her agenda had to do with phrasing. She had her special red pencil with which she would insert commas so that phrases did not become run on sentences. June insisted that her students play her pieces in context with the piano or a slowed down tape or CD where she insisted they be able to go from one end to the other without stopping and work towards that end endlessly. She had studied all the pieces that she taught, and was in a position to demonstrate how various passages could be executed. In her book Practice for Performance, published by Mel Bay, most of these insights are elaborated upon, and is available.

In spite of the fact that June was a very good teacher, she found out that there was a terrific Russian teacher who specialized in the education of middle school aged children who taught at the Meadowmount School of Music. I vehemently objected, saying, “Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman go to Meadowmount, definitely not June’s students.” Fortunately for June, the director of the Meadowmount School of Music was Eric Larsen, our very long-term friend and colleague, who said, very simply, “Why not your little kid rather than someone else’s little kid?”

The Russian teacher's name was Tatiana Vorobieva, and she came to Meadowmount every summer to be with her son, Dmitri Vorobiev. June’s students came back with beautiful bow arms and wonderful, balanced left hands. AND, every summer, the DeForest Morganstern Trust Fund sent a check to Meadowmount so that all June’s students got scholarships. Over time, it definitely paid off for the students.

Another aspect of June’s endless generosity was her connection with the violin shop A 440. Very often, A 440 would get violins made in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They were very good and relatively cheap. June was always on the lookout for these Hungarian Strads and either sold them or gave them to her students. It was just one other way that she made life better for anybody who came in contact with her.

Raleigh Music Collective

I just learned today that my old friend Julius Adams is now part of the Raleigh Music Collective. Julius, who is a superb violist, was just getting interested in conducting during his final year at the University of Illinois (maybe six or seven years ago). The Raleigh Music Collective, which is now partnered with Shaw University, is an El Sistema program that offers tuition-free musical education to string players in the area around Raleigh, North Carolina.

Julius introduced his advanced chamber ensemble to my arrangement of Florence Price's Adoration. I'm so happy that this piece, conducted by Julius, will have a chance to work its expressive magic on the hearts and bow arms of these fortunate El Sistema students. 

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola

I grew up hearing my father practice the solo viola part of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante. Back in the days when he was the principal violist of the Boston Symphony, the programming of viola concertos was extremely rare. Actually concerto performances by any of the principal players besides the concertmaster were few and far between. My father never performed the Bartok, the Walton, or the Hindemith with the Boston Symphony, but he did, as I recall, play the Bartok with a regional orchestra, and he performed the Hindemith at Tanglewood with the Berkshire Music Center orchestra. He also played concertos from time to time with the Boston Pops, and played a couple of concertos using the viola d'amore.

But he did perform the Mozart with the Boston Symphony.

I remember the circumstances of the performance he talks about in this interview, and I remember him talking about the scordatura solo viola part, which involves tuning the instrument up half a step and playing the piece as if it were written in D major. But I believe he was interested in learning it using scordatura around that time, but opted to go with what he had spent decades practicing because of the short notice.

You can hear him play a (very) short bit from the second movement here.

Our local university orchestra is having a performance of the piece in March. The violin professor, who comes from Korea, will be performing it with a violist friend from Korea. The viola part in the orchestra is divided into two parts, and I have been coming to rehearsals to play the (vital and very interesting) second viola part.

The first rehearsal I went to was difficult for me. There were too many (sad and beautiful) memories of my father involved, particularly because of the absence of the solo viola. I thought I could "take it," but I was wrong. The piece haunts my dreams. Literally.

So, to steel myself I have decided to learn the solo viola part. And I have been learning it in what I consider the original (the way I remember him practicing it), not in the scordatura.

Practicing it has been interesting and wonderful. The fingerings seem, somehow, to suggest themselves. And I love the second position options and the way half-step shifts add to the expressive gestures in the music.

I have told the violin professor that if he ever wants to read through the two solo parts together, I would be game. I think it might help "innoculate" me against at least a few bouts of tears. We will see. The important thing is connecting with the music itself, and doing so using the instrument and the bow that my father used when he first learned the piece.

Lips to Lips and Dust to Dust

Vladimir Nabokov's story "Lips to Lips" (Usta k ustam) was published in 1956 (more than twenty years after it was written). His notes mention that at the time of publication "everybody who might have been suspected of remotely resembling the characters in the story was safely and heirlessly dead."

The story, about a would-be writer getting a story published (or a fragment of a story published) in a journal, which he is tricked into subsidizing, brings to mind a recording project I wrote about in 2007.

The experience was a positive one for me. As a novice arranger I got paid what I believe my work at the time was worth. Gene Hoots paid me $15 (in 1998 dollars) per hour for my work transcribing his songs from a shoebox of cassette tapes that he recorded, singing and playing on his electric piano.

I arranged the songs and instrumental pieces for string quartet, and we played a few concerts; Gene sat on the stage and a professional tenor sang the vocal numbers.

Since Gene was a local celebrity, a business owner, and a genuinely nice guy, there was a lot of community spirit involved in the project. His producer, a guy from Las Vegas, got a nice commission from Gene, and the recordings we made graced the jukebox in Gene's restaurant.

After the restaurant was sold the recording we made of Gene's music was no longer sold at the counter, and it was no longer in the jukebox, which is no longer there. The only place you are likely to hear the recording is in the homes or cars of the people who bought the CDs, if they still have working CD players.

Gene's obituary doesn't make direct reference to the CD, but it does mention a country song he wrote "making it to the Bill Board [sic] top 30 Country Music Charts." Here is a reference to it in the Aprl 10, 1993 issue of Cash Box:

Quietly Going About My Business

I suppose that's what the majority of musicians have been doing for centuries: going about the business of practicing, writing, arranging, and teaching during times of insecurity, strife, and war. It seems that musicians of my generation (born in the 1950s and 1960s and reaching retirement age in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century) have had the best of all possible musical worlds.

As long as it lasts, we are able to get our hands on far more music than any of us can ever play or even listen to in a single lifetime.

In 2007 Norman Lebrecht declared classical music dead, and he has been proven wrong again and again. In order to keep my sanity I have to remind myself that the current state of many governments in the world (especially what is happening to government in America) can't stop us from doing what we do. It can stop us from getting decent medical care, and it can stop us from being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It can call on us to go out of our way to protect and advocate for colleagues and students who might be in vulnerable positions. We can try to give everybody we know a safe "home" in music, at least while we are playing together.

The quality of music making outside of the major population centers in America has skyrocketed in recent years, as has the quality of music making in what seems like every corner of the globe (I know the world is round, and that globes don't have corners).

Thanks to social media we are able to see and hear how engaged in music people of all ages are. But thanks to the changes that have happened in social media, it is not a comfortable place for me to "play" anymore, and most certainly not a way to find out what is happening in the community where I live. Hearing about local events after they have happened is no fun. What once felt like a "town square" turned into a parade of ads--the computer-based equivalent of those pages of ads that used to be inserted in the local paper, when we had a truly local paper.

As a result of taking the "easy" path to having social interactions, many of us have forgotten how to be social in real time. If we are to survive as musicians and as human beings we need to learn (or relearn) how to take the time to get to know the people who live in our communities, and have real correspondences with people we know who live in other communities.

After being dependent for so many years on the soma of social media apps for an easy "fix" of a fleeting sense of connection, I find that it is really hard to find and maintain meaningful relationships. It was really hard before social media. I remember. As I recall it required a lot of time, a lot of risk taking, and it often involved making and experiencing social faux pas.

Stephen Sondheim explained it so well in Company (1970). "Being Alive" is meant to address the need for meaningful romantic relationships. Now in 2025 I find that the song applies just as well to the need for real friendships as it does to romantic relationships.

One of Us

After receiving the photograph of my great grandmother Anna from my uncle last month, I remembered an obituary from 2021 for my father's first cousin Barbara Bazilian, who was Anna's granddaughter. Barbara's son Eric Bazilian was quoted in the obituary, so I looked him up on the internets and sent him a message that included the photographs of our mutual great grandparents.

My suspicions that the musical genes in the Fine family came to us through Anna might indeed be justified.

Shortly after he got the message the two of us had an amazing talk via FaceTime. It was as if we had always known one another. Eric, who spent much of his life in the Fine family "hub" of Philadelphia, knew our great grandfather Joseph, but he didn't know our great grandmother. She died in 1953, the year Eric was born.

Eric told me about his adventures in music. His are in a realm very different from mine. Eric played (and still plays) in a rock band, and he wrote a song that was a huge hit. Eric sang it for me, but I didn't recognize it. He told me that I was the first person he had met who didn't know the song. 

During the 1990s I was totally occupied with our very small children (born in 1987 and 1989) and working at radio station. At work I listened to the music that I played on the radio, and at home it was cassettes of kid music (dominated by Sharon, Lois, and Bram). 

In 1995 I started playing violin again, and once the kids went to bed my musical entertainment for the rest of the decade was practicing.

Once I heard the song (I listened right after that FaceTime call with Eric), I couldn't get it out of my head. I understand completely why it was so popular and continues to be popular around the world. I am so very proud of my second cousin once removed.



Everyone I have told the story to immediately recognized "One Of Us," particularly our kids. It turns out that Eric's song has long been a favorite of theirs, because they grew up in the 1990s, when it was everywhere (except where I was).