Two new Schubert Arrangements

You can buy the music here.

An oboist friend, the great John Dee, who I have had the pleasure of playing with in the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra for the last twenty years, asked me if the above Schubert arrangement would work for oboe. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for flutists) the flute part is too "flutey" in nature for the oboe, not to mention too high. But John's question set me on a quest.

I started making my way through Franz Schubert's songs, and found that this Opus 118 set from 1815 works perfectly as a set for pieces for oboe and string quartet.

The IMSLP doesn't have a category for the whole opus, only the individual songs, so I am only sharing this set of pieces through this blog and my thematic catalog blog.

If you would like to know the texts of the original songs, you can find them all (untranslated) here.

You can find the music here, and listen to a computer-generated recording here.

When life gets difficult (as it was for Schubert in so many ways), spending time with his music in any way is a wonderful antidote. It won't solve any of the problems that we face in these challenging times, but it gives a window into the sublime beauty that can be present in the human soul.

And we need to allow that beauty to overpower (even when played dolce and pianissimo) the images and actions (images that result from repulsive actions) that we are faced with on a daily basis, so that we can remain sane and can continue to try to do good in the world.

Mutability and Salome's Dance played with violin, viola, and bassoon

I'm so pleased with how these two pieces sound with bassoon in the place of the cello! And having an ensemble with my name in it devoted to playing music written by women makes me smile.

Sienna, Burnt and Raw

I'm so excited to share a recording of this performance of Sienna, Burnt and Raw by Safron Sonoda and Joana Izabelle, along with photographs of some of the cave paintings from Lascaux that served as inspiration for the piece.



You can find the music here.

An Epitaph for JDM

July 23, 2025 (In memory of John David Moore)

You can listen here.

A note for people who knew John David, but may not know the meaning of the letters F, A, and E in the music: F-A-E stands for "Frei aber einsam" (free but alone), the motto of Joseph Joachim, who was a close friend of Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Albert Dietrich. The three composers wrote a collaborative work for violin and piano in honor of Joachim. You can read about the F-A-E Sonata here.

The F-A-E Sonata was one of the first pieces I played together with John David, the first of hundreds.

Saying Good-bye to John David Moore

This is an old picture (2013) of me and John David, but it is the way I always want to remember him. The day before yesterday I learned that he had died, and it has taken me a while to fully accept it.

John David, who was a member of the Eastern Illinois University English Department, shared an office with Michael during their first years in town.

He was an erudite and brilliant person who had many literary interests, but I believe he was hired to teach children's literature. He preferred to teach Victorian children's literature, much to the suprise of the students, who might have signed up for his classes in order to read "easy" books.

When he started work at EIU he thought of himself as a person who was once a pianist, but eventually he bought a piano, and found his way back to music. After a short time he became the pianist of the Eastern Trio, and toured around the state with the group playing concerts. When the music department no longer supported the Eastern Trio, John David was left without a musical outlet.

In the early 2000s I was still a "child" violinist and violist. I found myself talking with John David during a parade one Fourth of July, and we decided to read some music together.

We started right away with serious repertoire, and played our first concert together in 2002 or 2003 (I can't seem to find the program).

But I do have programs for many of the thirty-some-odd concerts concerts we played between 2005 and 2018.

We rehearsed every week, and sometimes twice a week when we were preparing a concert. And we read through as much obscure music as John David could find by way of interlibrary loan. It was with John David that I first "met" a great many excellent composers of the past who have been neglected, including Amanda Maier.

It will take a long time for me to sift through the huge treasure chest of musical memories I have had with him. He was like a brother to me. And he was a good friend.

I have posted about our musical adventures over the years. You can read all those posts here. And you can read Michael's post about John David here.

The Very Best Week

It began with the Summer Strings concert, which, because of rain, was held indoors. Our conductor, a professor of meterology at the local university, was able to determine the necessity of using our rain location, a church with excellent acoustics, early in the day. The recording I made came out sounding really good.

You can hear the recording here.

And you can see the music on the program in the comments.

Everyone played their hearts out, and the audience (more than 200 people, I have been told) reflected that love of expression in a really big way. This, for me, is the height of musical experience. Our ensemble has three professional musicians in it. The rest do other things for a living, or else they are kids who are out of school during the summer. Some come from rural farming communities. All of them practice.

Immediately after the concert, after a short night of sleep, we headed off to New Jersey to see some good friends. We spent a day in Montclair and West Orange visiting a great bookstore, having fantastic ramen for lunch, and exploring the wonders of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, which was an experience that will take me a long time to fully process. If you ever find yourself in that area of New Jersey, go there. And if you are a "senior" you can get a pass for $20 that will let you and three friends in. You can use that pass for every National Park in the United States.

The next day we headed off to Massachusetts for a wedding. We had a wonderful time celebrating the coming together of two wonderful families (one of them ours) on the most beautiful of days in the most beautiful of places.

Our return trip, which we divided between two days, featured a huge thunderstorm that we encountered while it was my turn to drive. I proudly navigated my way through it. That was a huge accomplishment for me.

Before leaving for our adventure I started working on a piece for the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, and I did some work on it this morning. I have plans later today to practice the first violin part of Haydn Opus 74 no. 1, and get to play it tomorrow with friends.

I don't think that I have ever returned from a week away with such a full head and such a full heart.

Summer Strings Concert

Tonight's Summer Strings concert is not only going to be indoors, it is going to be live-streamed on Facebook. The concert begins at 7:00 p.m. Central Time, and should last around forty-five minutes.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1B7jXWDSvN/

Windows on the World

Michael and I are making our way through a Penguin Classics set of eighty little books (each is fifty some-odd pages of text, and measures six and a half inches by four inches) that offer a great cross-section of written material translated into English, and served in portions just large enough to provide a "tasting menu" of human culture.

There are short stories, poems, excerpts from plays, words of wisdom from antiquity (occidental and oriental), and historical writings.

A lot of it is new to both of us. And reading Marco Polo's writings about his travels in India shows us just how, shall we say "unusual" much of the world has been and, in many ways, continues to be. After reading about Caligula in writings by Suetonius today it occured to me that we as a human race haven't "progressed" since the days of the Roman Empire.

But as individuals and as collectives of individuals we have, somehow, found ways to lasso, cultivate, and preserve the most marvelous extremes of what humanity has to offer, particulary in the practices of art and music (and, as this series also shows, in writing).

It feels like as a human society (globally, as far as I can see through my various digital windows) we are entering a very dark period. We have stepped through one of the doors over here in the United States of America. Many of us haven't stepped through voluntarily: we were pushed through. And the tide will take us to places that I imagine will get darker and darker. We are passing shadows on the walls that feel familiar because of the knowledge that some of us have of history, but a great deal of what has happened to humanity over the millenia hasn't been written down. And a great deal of what has happened in history has never been reported because nobody survived to tell the tales.

But during those dark times there must have been music. Love (romantic, friendship, and between family members) is built into us. Community has always created a (sometimes fleeting) feeling of safety. Beauty and wonder in nature has always been around us, as well as the ability to appreciate it.

The progress that has happened during my lifetime has been extraordinary. I feel that we have prioritized kindness in the generation of children who are in preschool and in the early primary grades. The majority of them have learned (especially in public schools) to be kind to one another, to value kindness, and to be tolerant of the fact that everybody is different and everybody needs to get along.

This is a big thing.

I gave out a lot of candy to kids while I was walking in the Fourth of July parade (wearing my "No Kings in America" shirt).  Every child who was of speaking age said, "Thank you." And the parents of smaller children thanked me on behalf of their child.

This is enough to give me hope that the kindness that has been prioritized in education and in parenting will help us to be a more tolerant society even while we are faced with the darkness that is coming. Darkness can destroy a cruel society. But I would like to believe that a kind society might just have a chance. 

A Tale of Two T-shirts

The image on the shirt in the picture from July 4, 2023 was drawn by our daughter around a quarter of a century ago (her drawing won a local T-shirt contest).

I could wear my "Ring in a Century of Freedom" shirt proudly every Fourth of July until this year.

This year I'm wearing a "No Kings in America" shirt to march with the Coles County Democrats in the blaring heat of today's parade.