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.