Tchaikovsly "The Seasons" transcribed for viola and piano

I am very excited to share this brand new publication from the International Music Company of the complete Tchaikovsky Seasons arranged for viola and piano. You can find the music here on the Groth Music Company's website, or you can order it directly from the International Music Company via their new issues page.

Ilya Kaler and Rasa Vitkauskaite Play my arrangement of Price's "Adoration"

I have loved Ilya Kaler's playing ever since his Schumann Violin Sonatas and Paganini Caprices on some early Naxos recordings arrived at the radio station where I worked at the end of the twentieth century. What a thrill it is to hear his particular old-world sound embrace Florence Price's new-world lyricism. And Rasa Vitkauskaite's piano playing is as thrilling to hear as Ilya Kaler's violin playing.

The sonata that Beethoven wrote for George Bridgetower that we know as the "Kreutzer" Sonata (even though Kreutzer never played it) is part of this series of recordings. You can listen to that recording here.

“Dear Lara”

I asked the Canadian violinist/filmmaker Lara St. John if I could have a chance to see her new documentary, which was streaming, for a short time, only in Canada, and is, fortunately, having a handful of showings in a few select theaters in the United States. She made it possible for me to watch it, and I watched it with Michael, who is writing a post about it as I type.

[His post is here.]

I have been following the subject, the proliferation of sexual abuse of young women by their conservatory professors, for my entire life. I was deeply aware of the behavior of powerful men in the world of classical music when I was a child. It was sometimes even dinner table conversation when I was a teenager.

When you watch the documentary you will see the widespread nature of this criminal behavior within a field that is supposed to be about finding truth and beauty. The irony!

One thing I did learn from the film that I hadn't known was that the financé of my fifth-grade stand-partner in All-city orchestra was being abused by her teacher (neither of us knew her then: she was eight when it started). I feel so deeply sad for my friend. Sexual abuse, or in this case rape, has a profound impact on the entire musical community and their families and friends.

The only spoilers I will give you are musical ones. The whole musical background for the film is amazing. It is perfectly in proportion, and has fantastic playing, much of it by St. John. Never before have I experienced music that I know really well used as a narrative voice in a documentary in a way that transforms the way I think of the music.

The documentary style is honest, straightforward, comfortable, and relaxed: a perfect way to showcase dishonesty, ambiguous, uncomfortable, and tense. I wouldn't be surprised to see future films with St. John as either director or as the person running the music department. I also wouldn't be surprised if this film were to win a few major awards.

Magical Musical Hospital Moment

While we were on our usual walk of the hospital hallways yesterday, I noticed that the exercise room door was open, and inside was a young woman with a violin. Indeed it was part of a hospital musical program where they have musicians play in various locations on various days.

Our first experience with this was hearing Spanish and Brazilian music played by a guitarist in the lobby of one of the non-hospital buildings. It was wonderful to hear, and when I asked him if he could play something for me by Paulo Bellinati, he did.

On our next lap I learned that the violinist would be playing from 2:00 until 3:00, so I came in to listen. She played a few pieces from the various Suzuki books. It was lovely. She played beautifully in tune, and she played in such a way that demonstrated her deep love of music.

When she started playing a movement from one of the Seitz Concertos, a piece I can play the accompaniment for, after teaching it so often, I asked her if she wanted me to accompany her on the piano. She loved the idea. I grabbed my iPad, and we began. But the electric piano was about a quarter tone low, and we didn't know how to adjust it. I didn't want to ask her to tune down, so I grabbed my violin (my room is a few doors down from the music room), and we played some duets.

I had "Weights and Measures" on my iPad, so we played a few of those. I let her know that I wrote them, and explained how they worked as scale pieces. I hadn't ever played them with such a good violinist, and hadn't played them in a very long time as duet pieces. It was a real treat for me.

At around 3:00 a few of her friends came by. They were all college students working in the hospital for the summer while they were home in Chicago. They might have had other duties in the hospital, but they were all musicians. One was a pianist and a bass player, and the other was a violist.

The violinist told her friends that I had written the music we were playing, and it was clear to me that none of these young people had the sense that it was unusual in any way for a composer to be a woman. I asked the violist what he was working on, and the last piece he played was by Rebecca Clarke. The bass player had just played the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto for the first time in her life, and was thrilled by the experience.

The violist and I talked about repertoire, and I learned about a new/old/obscure viola composer (new-to-me) from him: I. Chandoschkin (1747-1804), a Soviet "creation." I am excited to do a deep dive into learning about this person.

I was thrilled and enchanted by these young musicians, and I somehow feel, in the not-yet-engrafted marrow of my bones, that "the kids are alright," at least the kids that have music running through their veins,

Charles Dickens and Pauline Viardot!

Imagine my surprise when coming upon this passage in David Copperfield:

"I came out to inquire whether Annie would like to go to the opera tonight," said Mr. Maldon, turning to her. "It's the last good night there will be, this season; and there's a singer there, whom she really ought to hear. She is perfectly exquisite. Besides which, she is so charmingly ugly," relapsing into languor.

The only singer contemporary to Dickens it could be would have to be Pauline Viardot.

I'm rather new to Dickens, and though I have certainly observed that he had a great enjoyment of music, I never would have imagined that he would have been close friends with Pauline Viardot. He first met her after a performance of Gluck's Orphée, (she played the title role, which is written for a mezzo-soprano) and Dickens wrote about the encounter to his friend John Forster (Nonesuch Letters, 3.322):

Last night I saw Madame Viardot do Gluck's Orphée. It is a most extrordinary performance--pathetic in the highest degree, and full of quite sublime acting. Though it is unapproachably fine from first to last, the beginning of it, at the tomb of Eurydice, is a thing that I cannot remember at this moment of writing, without emotion. It is the finest presentation of grief that I can imagine. And when she has received hope from the Gods, and encouragement to go into the other world and seek Eurydice, Viardot's manner of taking the relinquished lyre from the tomb, and becoming radiant again, is most noble. Also she recognizes Eurydice's touch, when at length the hand is put in hers from behind, like a most transcendant [sic] genius. And when, yielding to Eurydice's entreaties she has turned round and slain her with a look, her despair over the body is grand in the extreme. It is worth a journey to Paris to see, for there is no such Art to be otherwise looked upon. Her husband stumbled over me by mere chance, and took me to her dressing-room. Nothing could have happened better as a genuine homage to the performance, for I was disfigured with crying.

They soon became very close friends.

Shortly after finishing Bleak House I had the idea of writing some musical character studies featuring characters in the novel, but now that I am in the middle of David Copperfield, my cast of possible musical characters has expanded a great deal.

Once I get out of the hospital and my stay close to the hospital (on 53rd Street in Chicago), and can get my hands on my viola d'amore, I will get to work on a piece for three violas d'amore (to be played at the 2027 viola d'amore congress) inspired by some of the characters I have come to know.

I am certainly not the first person to do this, but I might be the first to write Dickens-inspired pieces for three violas d'amore. I do imagine that Dickens would be enchanted by the instrument.

Here is a passage from a paper by Charles Cudworth that was published in the June, 1970 edition of The Musical Times (Vol. 111, p. 589):

Dickens was not only intersted in music himself; he also provoked music in others. During his lifetime, his novels fostered some curious musical offspring, such as The David Copperfield Polka and The Barnaby Rudge Tarantelle, to say nothing of The Micawber Quadrille, "played in the drama of Little Em'ly, at the Olympic Theatre," in 1869.

Scenes from the Hospital on my "Birthday"

How appropriate is it to have "Symphony" as the maker of the water and ice machine that sits outside of my hospital room? And isn't it nice to know that the walnuts our daughter brought me from my favorite store were packaged in a facility that also packages nuts.

Today I get five bags of stem cells pumped into my system. I believe they start going in shortly before lunchtime, which gives me time to go to the exercise room, which has a piano to play. There is also a music stand in there, so I don't need to assemble and take down my heavy folding stand, and risk getting another pinching bruise.

I showed the physical therapist, who gave me goals for walking and brought me to the above-mentioned exercise room (which is very close to my room), my Sigo tenor recorder, which requires a fairly large inhalation (like 2000 ml of air to make a good sound). She thought it might be a great research project for people involved in physical therapy.

I hope that other musicians going through stem cell transplants might be encouraged to try instrument as part of their recovery process.

Michael and I have been playing together every evening after dinner (Sigo and guitar), but tonight, now that my port insertion is healed, I can play violin too.

The "birthday" in the title of this post means that my immune system is like that of a newborn baby today. It is called "Day Zero." I probably won't post much during the rest of this week since my energy level will be very low, but I will do my best. Connecting with people, and particularly with musicians, really does help.

Harper Theater in Chicago

Some of my friends who have given performances of Price's Adoration have sent me video recordings which I have been listening to in the my Chicago hotel room (using headphones, of course) while Michael sleeps. Festivities over at the hospital begin this morning at 10:00 (labs, an appointment with my doctor, and a procedure to insert a port under my right collarbone for the chemotherapy I will get tomorrow and then for the stem cells that will follow the next day).

Our hotel, on Harper Court and 53rd Street is located in what feels like the center of the universe. Last night we walked across the street to Virtue, where we had a remarkable dinner, and this evening we are planning to cross the same street and see Toy Story 5 at the Harper Theater.

I have had this constant thought over the past several months that Florence Price, who lived on the south side of Chicago, and played the organ in movie theaters, might have worked in this neighborhood. I wonder if she ever played at the Harper. And while doing all this wondering, I can't seem to figure out any reason why she wouldn't have.

The theater was built in 1913 as a vaudeville house and became a movie theater in 1935. You can read a little about it here. It had a Kimball organ. Florence Price was an organist and a composer, who certainly would have been able to improvise accompaniments to the silent movies that would have been shown at the Harper.

Here is a Facebook page about the Harper that has a great photo (I can't figure out how to include it in this post using hotel wifi). And here's a 2008 post in Hyde Park Progress (long live the blogosphere) that has a great deal of information about the Harper Theater.

What a Concert!

The above video is set to start where my transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration" starts, but do listen to the rest of the concert, particularly concertmaster Albena Danailova's performance of the violin solo in Massenet's "Méditation from Thaïs," and Bryn Terfel's performance of "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.

I was deeply impressed with the way Lorenzo Viotti shaped the phrases of "Adoration." An arranger can only present possibilities, but a great conductor can take them where they need to go in order to sound their best. The experience of hearing the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic, an ensemble steeped in such a rich musical history, connect their hearts and souls collectively to the music of Florence Price was overwhelming. It also made me smile when I noticed a gentle touch of the special and inimatible lilt that is built into the orchestra's DNA.

And I am so pleased to share this excerpt from a review of the concert.

Who could ask for anything more?

Florence Price on Juneteenth

We enjoyed watching and listening, by way of our television set, to the festivities over at the Obama Center yesterday, and though the time we will spend there this summer will be on the grounds and in the areas accessible to the public without tickets, we look forward to being able to get tickets and experience the whole center.

I understand that the musical choices made for the event were matters of personal taste (as musical choices always are and really always should be). But somehow musical traditions that are not necessarily popular tend to get left off the list. Again and again. And again and again.

I hope that at some point the people who are responsible for music at the Obama Center learn about South Side resident Florence Price, who lived on South Calumet Avenue (3835--the building no longer exists) from 1927 until she died in 1953. She taught at the Abraham Lincoln Centre (700 East Oakwood Blvd., it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), a building that shares a spirit similar to that of the Obama Center.

[Update: I just learned that the Chicago Philharmonic is playing something by Price on their July 27th concert at the Obama Center.]

Tonight, in Vienna, Austria, the Vienna Philharmonic is playing my arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration" as part of their Sommernachtskonzert at the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens in Vienna. The concert begins at 8:45 (Vienna time), and admission is free.

It might be broadcast live somewhere in the United States on PBS, but I don't think I will be able to hear it live because the actual time of the concert for me will be at 3:45 a.m. tomorrow. I'm sure there will be YouTube options available to see and hear tomorrow.

What a great addition to the celebration of Juneteenth this is, and what a message it sends to the larger world about an important American cultural voice that resonates in the hearts of everyone who hears it or plays it.

I can take credit for a couple of things: I happened to know about Florence Price through an article about her in a magazine devoted to the work of women in music, and found a PDF of her "Adoration" in its original form as an organ piece in the IMSLP.

I can take credit for instantly recognizing that "Adoration" was a great piece of music, and I can take credit for using my composing and arranging skills to make an arrangement for violin and piano that would sound as much like an organ with the melody in a violin stop as possible. I can take credit for making an arrangement for strings that can sound lovely when played by musicians at all levels of competence. And I can take credit for keeping the music (now in a dozen or so arrangements for different instruments) in the public domain, and making it accessible to musicians all over the world for free.

But the music itself: the melody, the harmony, the phrases, and the rhythms, are all Florence Price's. I just did some effective translation.

Maybe the community of people who care deeply about the music that matters to me is not necessarily a local one, anywhere. But as a person who wrote music, taught in the community, played piano and organ in movie theaters before movies had sound, and contributed in myriad undocumented ways to the life of people in Chicago, particularly, I imagine, in the South Side, it would be nice if an organization like the Obama Center could embrace and amplify Florence Price and her work.

Learning Analogy

My sometimes quiet, smart, and very musical ten-year-old recorder student always inspires me to figure out ways of explaining things. Today's challenge (for me) came from trying to understand why she remembered how to play pieces she practiced a while ago, but hadn't seen for a long time.

I suggested that how something goes in your brain makes a difference. And I went on to suggest that learning a piece of music carefully is kind of like folding clothes and putting them away in a drawer. When it comes time for you to wear a particular item of clothing again you strive to remember which drawer it is in, are happy to have found it, and then proceed to put it on.

With a piece of music or a difficult passage in a piece, I have found that the condition it was put into my brain is pretty much the same condition I find it in when I play it again. So a passage that I have notched carefully with the metronome so that I could play it in tune and in rhythm can surprise me by being far easier to play well when I remove it from its figurative drawer.

But a piece I basically sightread every time I play it still seems to hold its "wrinkles" no matter how many times I unearth it from the figurative pile on the floor. If I can even find it.

Things are different once I put the time and care into to "ironing" (practicing) those "wrinkles" out.

Richard Powers on the health of being moved

I was deeply moved by this paragraph in "The Parting Glass," Powers's contribution to Music and Mind, a 2024 collection of essays about music and health compiled and edited by Renée Fleming:

Countless clinical studies have now tied the secret of health to moving. There is also great health in being moved, something that produces similar physiology. Think about the old meanings buried in the eymology of "emotion." To move and feel are complements, and the emotion that a tune triggers is a tune-up in how to move more deeply through the wider world. Music makes us go somewhere. It propels us into new states, new vantages, new emotional affordances. If you ask a scientist why music is healthy, the answer will come in units of cortisol and heart rate and blood-oxygen levels. But if you ask this listener, I'd say that music is an off-line cognitive therapy. By making us sad in the absence of real tragedy, it leaves us more adept in sadness when life calls for the real thing.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

New String Arrangements for 2026 Summer Strings

You can find links below to PDF files for these brand new (and road-tested) arrangements of pieces suitable for multi-level string ensembles to use for educational or recreational purposes.

If (a picture paints a thousand words)
Walking in the Air
Enchanted
March pour la Cérémonie des Turcs
Plaisir d’amour
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Here Comes the Sun
Quand on s’promène au bord de l’eau
If I Were a Rich Man

Haydn vs. Mozart

I have spent weeks trying to figure out how best to finger and bow the first violin part of the D minor Mozart "Haydn" Quartet. After a lot of thought, and after a lot of practice, I have come up with some solutions that work for me. The piece has so many sudden changes in dynamics that require being in different parts of the bow for different outcomes.

When I play the piece tonight with my friends, I'm sure to learn that my choices might, hopefully only here and there, not have been the best.

But that's the thing: Mozart opens up possibilities with his music that require a great deal of creativity. Maybe that's why we keep trying to meet him halfway throughout our musical lives. So many of us return to the same pieces again and again, hoping to achieve cleaner articulation, longer and stronger phrases, and emotional understanding.

I can proudly speak from experience concerning Haydn because I have practiced and played (not performed, however) the first violin parts of all of his quartets. I have found that there is usually one clever technical solution that makes a challenging phrase flow naturally. As florid as his phrases look on the page, they are a graceful pleasure to play, once you figure out exactly how. And then I have found cases where a clever technical solution I have found in an opening movement makes its way through all four movements of a quartet. That always gives me a thrill.

Maybe Haydn wrote his quartets with the idea of providing a satisfying way for musicians to interact socially. There are deep (very deep) emotional periods, and there are serious contrapuntal challenges as well as modulations in and out of remote-seeming keys, but the balances always seem to have been worked out in the composition process. And the challenges in Haydn seem, at least to me, more like opportunities for interesting music making than the challenges in Mozart that address every musician's capacity in the ensemble for introspection and intensely dramatic personal musical expression.

. . . After playing last night I can report that most of my bowing choices did not work in context, and that it really didn't matter at all. A great time was had by all. What a fantastic piece of music!

My Aunt Jeanne

I learned pretty much everything about the maternal side of the family from my aunt Jeanne, my mother's younger sister. Jeanne was born in 1940 in an apartment across the street from Jackson Park on the south side of Chicago. My grandparents spelled her name the typical way, but Jeanne preferred to spell it the way the French did. She idolized my mother, who was kind enough to include her in the various fanciful games she played with her sophisticated friends. Here she is as the character "it," the page turner.

You can see the whole photo tableau here.

Jeanne went on to study English at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and became an actress, an English teacher, and a director of drama productions at Nicholas Senn High School (several of her students mention her as favorite teacher in this link). She also did some professional acting in Chicago.

She visited us often when was a child. Aunt Jeanne taught me all about astrology, and she taught me how to read Tarot cards. I learned important things from her about the early life of my mysterious mother, who rarely talked about her childhood. Jeanne and her first husband Frank once took me on a hike up Mount Greylock, the highest mountain in Massachusetts, and they let me do the hike barefoot. I was probably eleven or twelve, and felt so incredibly fortunate to have such a cool aunt.

Mysticism ruled Jeanne's life, as did the phases of the moon.

She was a dedicated Rosicrucian. I spent one of my winter vacations with her in Chicago, and she took me to her Egyptian-themed lodge, but I was only permitted to enter the lobby.

She took me out to dinner at fabulous restaurants, and brought me to meet my great aunt Lil, my grandmother's sister. Great aunt Lil gave me a Persian lamb coat and a suitcase full of vintage clothes from the 1940s. Lil and her husband Mike loved to gamble, and they spent much of the year in Las Vegas.

My aunt's half sister Janie was the same age as my mother. My grandfather had two families on the same Chicago block. Eventually my grandmother divorced him, and after my mother and Jeanne were grown up she married a nice guy and moved to Florida.

Janie, who was very beautiful, worked as a waitress at the original Playboy Club in Chicago. After art school she left Chicago to work as a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas. Janie's mother, who was named Jane, became close with my aunt Jeanne when she was an adult.

I remember Jane calling Jeanne while I was there to ask her what phase the moon was in.

Jeanne, Janie, and June (my mother) remained close, and as older women they would meet once a year in Las Vegas. Janie died first, and my mother died in 2016.

Jeanne's life came to an end around May 27th, 2026. It is believed that she had a heart attack at home. A friend went to check in on her, and must have called the police when she didn't answer the door or her phone.

She lived a very full and a very colorful life, and I like to think that it was full and colorful until the very end.

I am writing this post for my own sense of closure, but I am also writing it so that former students and people who knew Jeanne (over the past eighty-six years she has been known as Jean Blume, Jeanne Blume, Jeanne Reckitt, Jeanne Reckitt-Castillo, and Jeanne Castillo) can find something about her on line. She never used a computer, never had anything to do with social media, and never even had an email address.

I did tell her about posting that picture of her as "It," ten years ago, and she was OK with it. She was acting in her first part.

Left and Right (with a heart between)

This is a photo from my first day of stem cell harvesting. Michael didn't take a photo from the second day because it would look just the same, only with the arms reversed.

This procedure, which required a lot of preparation, was very successful. The stem cells that the hospital harvested were immediately frozen. On June 30th (my mother's birthday) they will be thawed and pumped into my body with instructions to grow bone marrow.

For the first day of the procedure my left arm had to stay completely still while my blood circulated through a centrafugal machine. I could move my right arm (which also had an IV) to do whatever needed to be done hand-wise. I had to pay attention to my left arm and hand, though: when the machine beeped, I had to squeeze a flexible textured ball (probably silicone, definitely green). The beeping indicated that blood was not flowing the way it was supposed to flow.

The second day my right arm was the one staying still and squeezing the ball when necessary, and I could only use my left hand for the things that hands do.

I also needed to monitor both hands (on both days) for signs of tingling, so that my calcium and citrus levels could be adjusted. It was hard work, and I was at it for eight hours each day.

I woke up at home (yay) this morning with an odd feeling of heightened sensory awarness, which I attributed to getting a full night's sleep, after enduring insomnia from two days of stimulating injections given in the evening, which instructed my bones to release stem cells into my bloodstream.

After breakfast Michael set to work on fixing a fan that was making noise. He removed and cleaned the cap of the screw mechanism that attaches the blades to the motor, but he was baffled when he couldn't get the cap to screw back on.

Without even thinking about it I screwed cap on counter-clockwise. (Needless to say, he was impressed.)

Then, when I sat down at the piano to play some Haydn, I noticed that I had a much quicker left/right response than I have ever had, and that my hands were working together in a brand new way.

It was as if some kind of plaque had been cleaned from whatever it is that connects my brain to my hands. I also noticed that I had a more direct connection between my ear and my hands than I have ever had before while playing the piano.

I'm not supposed to play violin until this evening (twenty-four hours after my release from the hospital) because it would require arm strength to hold up the instrument and use the bow.

I'm excited to see what happens then, but for now I think I need a little nap before taking a walk (before it rains).

Feeling, Disease, and Anxiety

I have been feeling exceptionally well for a couple of weeks. The treatments for my multiple myeloma have pushed the level of cancer in my system way down, and though I sometimes feel a little bit tired (particularly when I do not have the "assistance" of steroids), I have been feeling rather normal.

Hot flashes and night sweats have returned with regularity, but the intense need to drink great amounts of water all day and all night have subsided. I have the occasional age-appropriate ache and pain, which I had trouble noticing when I had intense pain caused by the (now dead) tumor on my sacrum, and my regular doses of steroids and other anti-cancer medications.

Now, with the exception of a daily aspirin and thrice-daily doses of a drug that protects me from getting shingles, it is just me in my body for the rest of May. Then I have to inject myself with human growth hormone to prepare for next week's festivities: the harvest of stem cells for my bone marrow transplant at the end of June.

After the "harvest" my major task is to show up at the hospital for a big dose of chemotherapy to wipe out my (still a wee bit cancerous) bone marrow, and then build up my immune system after my harvested (and I guess cleared of cancer) stem cells get poured back into my system.

During the past few days I have noticed a kind of free-flowing anxiety surging through my system: anxiety about being in the right place at the right time, anxiety about packing everything I need for my time in the hospital and my time near the hospital, anxiety about cleaning, and anxiety about recovery.

I have also noticed that when I practice music that allows me to release emotional energy, I feel better. During the past six months or so, since cancer-related circumstances started taking over my life, I went through a period of relative emotional numbness that I found was relived by music. When I was playing, I felt alive. The feeling lasted for a while after playing, as long as I was thinking about the music I had been playing.

I also noticed that I could become emotionally connected to prose passages, people, and circumstances in the books I was reading.

This (now pretty much under control since I have been able to talk about it) anxiety could be happening because my body is no longer in a constant combat mode. I now have the leisure to feel, which I like to think of as a good thing.

Practicing now seems to be a little bit different from the way it felt a few weeks ago. I can think about the "how" of making a phrase sound better with more objectivity, which is something that makes practicing more productive than simply playing because I need some emotional relief.

Knowing where to be in the bow, for example, is something I can only accomplish through focused practice. And when I am in the anxiety-informed state of performing, the practicing I have done allows me to enter a more free-flowing and expressive state than I would be in if I hadn't practiced properly.

Creative Energy

I would say that in my sixty-seven years of life I have spent at least fifty years of it being filled with restless creative energy. Like most people, I spent the first decade and a half of it doing the work of growing and learning. I grew in social, mental, physical, and musical ways, and was fortunate to grow up in a place (Newton, Massachusetts), where I was stimulated by my friends and my teachers. I was also stimulated by adults in the musical community, and was fortunate (in some ways) to have had a great deal of freedom to explore my interests on my own.

In my young adulthood, which was riddled with and rattled by circumstances that were beyond my control, I became increasing restless. Even when life circumstances became safe and stable by marrying Michael and raising our (now grown-up) children, that restlessness found its way into my head in the form of creative energy that needed to be expressed.

Practicing and playing music wasn't enough. Learning a new instrument from "scratch" wasn't enough. But writing music was just the ticket. And doing it every day gave me a way of turning my restless energy into productive energy, and allowed me to write satisfying music that I found beautiful to share and to hear played.

Now that I have this cancer occuping my body and my mind, I have been filling my days with things to distract me from the reality of being sick. I practice violin and piano every day, and have found that I now have more technique on the piano and more control on the violin than I ever imagined I would have.

I can even sometimes play the piano fluently, and that makes me feel me feel stimulated and satisfied.

I do not, however, feel restless. And for the first time in decades I do not feel compelled develop musical ideas that might pop into my head into pieces of music. Maybe it is because I have written enough, or maybe there isn't room in my coping mechanism for the restlessness that kept me so full of creative musical energy for so many years.

After I recover from my upcoming (June 30th) bone marrow transplant, which will take some time, I wonder if the creative energy and restlessness that once fueled my writing will return. And if it does, I wonder how my new-found piano skills and deeper physical understanding of piano music might inform what comes out.

Emmanuel Pahud

Last night Michael and I watched Lumière, Le Cinéma!, a 2024 film that stitches together several dozen fifty-second-long Lumière Brothers films from the late nineteenth century, covers the product with informative narration, and underscores it with music by Gabriel Fauré. Included in the underscore was the first part of the Fantasie for Flute and Piano. The performance was so beautiful, so deeply original, and so perfectly of the period (late nineteenth-century France), that I couldn't imagine it would have been anyone other than Emmanuel Pahud playing. I was correct. It was his recording with Eric Le Sage.

I first heard Emmanuel Pahud in 1995 when I was working as a CD reviewer for the American Record Guide. The recording was of sonatas by Carl Maria von Weber. The review was never published. Perhaps the recording label (Valois) was too small, or the editor didn't think it was important enough music to include in the magazine. In those pre-email days we used to send three-inch discs with reviews typed in Word Perfect in the mail to the magazine, and that was that. I did not keep a copy of my review.

The flute playing on the Weber recording was remarkable. Pahud had, even at the beginning of his career, found a path towards musical infinity with the flute. Though I aspired at one point to make my way in music through the flute, I knew that the flute wasn't the instrument that could take me where I wanted to go.

But what a joy it is to listen to Emmanuel Pahud play the flute.

Here's the Fauré:

Bonus Days

I do not believe in life after death, but, because of my recent intimacy with cancer, I have started to understand things quite differently than I had in life B.C. (or b.c.). I have come to think of everything that has happened in 2026 as a generous bonus.

If I hadn't had the opportunity to start treatment for this cancer in January, when the pain from the tumor on my sacrum was unbearable, I would very likely not be here to write this post. But science, insurance (Medicare), an enormous amount of support from my family (particularly Michael who helped me through the worst pain and the worst fears), a team of brilliant and dedicated doctors, extremely helpful and dedicated nurses, and my friends, have made it possible for me to experience extraordinary things during what I have come to understand are bonus days.

Come to think of it, every day is a bonus day.

Today I played a Bach prelude and part of a fugue on the piano, practiced some Brahms on the violin (I'm playing with a new pianist, and next Tuesday evening we're playing Brahms), practice some of the music I have written for violin and piano (this new pianist is interested in reading that too). It ain't Brahms, but what is except Brahms? I also played some Grieg on the piano, did some teaching, and talked with both of our kids and our grandchildren (who wished me a happy birthday today).

Michael and I read two chapters of Bleak House, mowed the lawn, and went out for dinner.

That I have a future is a gift.

That I can look forward to seeing our daughter and two granddaughters this weekend, and can look forward to the arrival (into the world) of another granddaughter next week is a gift.

That the treatment for this cancer has made it possible for me to walk every day, to practice every day, to read every day, to go to concerts and watch movies, to do work when necessary, and to do daily tasks (cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning the house) is a gift.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-one, will always be a young man to me.

I am grateful to Lisa Hirsch, who knew MTT well, for making a portal post with multiple obituaries and links.

I had the opportunity to sing in the children's scene at the end of an unstaged performance of Wozzeck in 1969 or 1970 at Tanglewood, and Michael Tilson Thomas was our conductor. He stood in front of us, and we felt safe. It is an odd thing to say when referring to that particular opera, but that is how I remember the experience. Before we were on stage everything was bloody and murderous. On stage we had this animated young man making sure we were singing together.

I got to sing with him again a few years later, when I was in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. My mother was in the chorus, and somehow I was able sing in it too. I found the program for the first concert that I sang with the chorus, and Michael Tilson Thomas, who I already knew, was the conductor. I had no idea how unusual this program was for the Boston Symphony Orchestra to play.

I do remember that Thomas always referred to the Canticum Sacrum as the "Canticum Geshundheit," and I could never figure out exactly why. Could the word "Geshundheit" which means health in German, be in the same "family" as a "Bless you" after a sneeze, since Sacrum means sacred?

This has bothered me for much of my life.

My Arrangement of Price's "Adoration" to be Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic!

I just learned the other day that for their Sommernachtskonzert on June 19, 2026 the Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Lorenzo Viotti, has programmed my arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration."

I remember looking at the organ music (Price's original) for the first time in the winter of 2013, and being blown away by what I heard. I immediately made setting of it for violin and piano, and brought it to my friend John David Moore's house to play it through. We decided to include it on the concert we were planning for February 28, 2014.

The two of us were the only people who knew it as a piece for violin and piano. And that concert increased the number of "Adoration" cognoscenti by a few dozen.

I decided to make a string orchestra version of the piece for our local Summer Strings orchestra, and shared that arrangement, as well as the violin and piano arrangement in the IMSLP. You can find all of my arrangements of "Adoration" here, along with settings by me and by other arrangers. The number of musicians who enjoyed playing the piece increased exponentially. And the number of people who enjoyed listening increased exponentially as well.

During her lifetime Florence Price never got the kind of recognition she deserved for her exquisite work. The idea of the Vienna Philharmonic including a piece written by her on one of their concerts would, I am certain, have been something far beyond her wildest dreams.

And having an arrangement of mine being performed by the Vienna Philharmonic is nothing I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I feel so grateful that I have had the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to do Price's "Adoration" justice as a piece for string orchestra (as well as one for violin and orchestra), and I feel so grateful to the people who chose the music for this Vienna Philharmonic Sommernachtskonzert for putting the Price on the program.

Back in the very early 1980s, when I was studying recorder in Vienna, and playing flute and recorder on the Kärntner Straße in order to pay for rent and food, and hanging out at Jazz clubs with my friend Leo Wright, I never would have imagined being "present" in the city in this way. But here we are.

Matters Musical and Emotional

I heard a most interesting discussion on NPR the other day while driving to my weekly blood draw (treatment is going very well) about a crisis in mattering. Hearing this discussion at this particular point in my life (mid 60s, with a disease that has certainly caused me to think about life differently), was exactly what I needed.

Before the internet became the highway, street, road, window, and path to just about everything we do, both as musicians, and in extra-musical activities, my feelings of not mattering were personal family issues (a lot of typical middle child stuff in a wildly atypical family). Despite my issues growing up,  I had friends, and I knew that I mattered to a lot of people.

Mattering and connection were, thank goodness, hard-wired into me through public school, my neighborhood, my musical life, writing letters, talking on the telephone, and even my various workplaces. Occasionally colleagues became friends, but even if we remained only cordial in our interactions, those relationships still mattered.

We didn't think so at the time, but raising children in a small town ended up being a real advantage in the mattering department. Even though they came of age with the internet (though it was primative and wired with annoying dial-up connections), they grew up with activities they enjoyed and a local paper. They also had to live and grow among people who had very different priorities from the priorities we had at home.

But they knew everyone, and everyone knew them. And they grew up knowing that they mattered. In their adult lives and in their lives as parents of young children they both seek out relationships that are meaningful. 

Our son lives in the Boston area, which is where I grew up. I told him that I used to know all the cracks in the pavement in the Back Bay area of Boston, but then they changed the pavement. Aside from his young family and a few friends, I have very little connection with Boston. But I occasionally learn that musicians there play music that I have written and arranged. I need to remind myself that what I do and what I have done matters, even if I hear about it in indirect ways. It is so easy for me to forget that what I have done (and what I do) musically does matter.

I think the music I write as a medium through which musicians who play together can feel that they matter to one another. I try to make my music as comfortable as possible to play or sing, so that people are free to express themselves. 

After a period of withdrawal from active professional musical life because of the unpredictability of the array of chemo drugs I am taking (since the beginning of 2026), I am doing my best to start stepping out a bit and am making connections with more local musicians. It feels like a healthy way to move forward.

I am also using this time to take a break from composing. I am spending all my musical energy practicing violin and playing piano.  After playing at the piano for the past decade or two, I can finally play the instrument more freely, and without tension. I have no desire to develop the kind of technique that would make me sound like a real pianist, and do not care at all about playing at any tempo faster than molto moderato, so I do not practice scales or etudes. I just play music. 

Violin is a different story. My goal with the violin is to be able to play everything at tempo, in tune, with clean articuation, and with the greatest possible sense of phrasing and nuance. It makes for a nice life balance. Good cop, bad cop, I guess.

I am learning a great deal about writing music from Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms these days. They are my best teachers. I am excited to see what comes out on paper when it is time for me to write something new (or when someone asks me to write something new, whichever comes first).

Ambition

I was an ambitious teenager. I was also a very hard worker. As a high school flutist I used to set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. and practice scales for an hour in the basement. Then I would have breakfast and get on the 7:10 school bus.

I would use my free periods in school to practice (we had two practice rooms in the music office). I must have spent some after school time doing schoolwork, and I must have spent time with friends (playing duets, no doubt). After dinner I would often get on the trolley and go to concerts at the New England Conservatory or Boston University. Then I would practice until 11:00, listen to a record (usually a piece of Brahms chamber music), and would go to sleep immediately after the tone arm on my record player returned to its resting place, which turned the whole machine off.

I never let more than six hours of time pass between practice sessions. And I listened to a lot of Brahms chamber music.

My ambition got me into Juilliard. My ambition found me friends who worked as diligently and consistently as I did. My ambition made me fearless in the presence of the accomplished musicians I met in Europe, particularly people who specialized in early music, and it made me unafraid to work in radio, as a reviewer, and even as a kind of a scholar, even though I had absolutely no training in musical scholarship. 

But it wasn’t ambition that fueled my return to playing violin in my early thirties, after nearly twenty years away. It was pure need. I had run into an expressive wall, and needed to find a way to move forward. 

I needed to be able to play a stringed instrument so that I could play the kind of chamber music that was never available to me as a flutist. I needed Schumann in my life, and Brahms, and Beethoven beyond the Serenade.

I knew that at my age there was no path to the kind of a career I imagined I would have as a flutist. I was quite demoralized after every path to “success” (or even employment) as a flutist came to an abrupt and bitter end, but I achieved competence as a string player rather quickly, and found that I had a knack for making string quartet arrangements.

Arranging gave me the courage to write my own music, and I found my old ambition returning. I started studying composition, and then essentially chain wrote piece after piece. I loved the hard work. I loved the rhythm of getting up very early and writing. I loved the thrill of hearing something I wrote played or sung beautifully. I particularly loved having the opportunity to express myself without the need to be judged by others. I have always been my fiercest critic, and organizing the notes and rhythms of a piece successfully is always gratifying.

I fell into the “class” of a “woman composer,” whether I thought of myself as one (different, in some way than a “man composer,” I suppose?) or not, and found that I was treated less seriously than my peers, regardless of the quality of my work. I had to fight simply to be taken seriously.

But then I found a few people who did take me and my work seriously. And then there were more.

I have a body of work that I am proud of. I know what I can do, and I know what my limitations are. I have never measured success in monetary terms; I measure it in terms of the usefulness of what I have written. 

I could use monetized social media to property promote my work, but I have no ambition to do so. If somebody wants a piece of music, they know where to find it. I don’t want to adjust my biography to make myself worthy of someone’s attention. I prefer to let my work speak for itself.

I want to be able to play more difficult music on the piano, and I want to (finally) get a chance to play the Brahms piano quintets (all of them), on either violin or viola. Maybe I will write something new. Or not.

But I am calling on all my experience with ambition to make it through my cancer treatment, which continues through the end of July. And then it is only a few months until November, when the fate of the world has a chance of moving towards something resembling sanity.

Haydn String Quartet Project

My quartet friends and I have, over the past decade, made our way through all of Haydn's sixty-seven numbered string quartets in order, including the "spurious" quartets that were once attributed to him. And on Easter Sunday we are going to play (can you believe it?) the Seven Last Words. After that we will begin playing the Mozart "Haydn" Quartets, a truly delicious next place to go.

I noticed something yesterday while playing Opus 77 no. 2 in F major: the opening theme in the first violin part brings to mind the opening unison motive of Beethoven's F major String Quartet, Opus 18, no. 1. The opening of the Beethoven feels (at least to me) like a modernized and condensed answer to Haydn's graceful and gentile opening.

In 1798 and 1799 Prince Lobkowitz (of Vienna) commissioned both Haydn and Beethoven to each write a set of six string quartets, so both composers were at work: one at the end of his career, and one at the beginning of his career.

If you were to just look at the publication information it wouldn't seem possible that Beethoven, under ordinary circumstances, could have known what turned out to be Haydn's last complete string quartet. Haydn's Quartet Opus 77 no. 2 wasn't published until 1802, while the six quartets of Beethoven's Opus 18 were published in 1801. But Vienna was a small town, musically speaking, and the composers shared a patron. It wouldn't be beyond anyone's imagination that Beethoven might have had chance to see, through the good graces of the Prince, the manuscript score of what he believed would have been Haydn's last quartet long before it was published.

The F major Quartet was not the first of the Opus 18 quartets that Beethoven wrote; it was the second. Maybe he put it first in the publication so that his bold opening related-but-opposite F-major opening gesture to that of Haydn could more effectively and more immediately introduce his modernized approach to the string quartet.

After playing Opus 77 no. 2 we played Haydn's very last quartet, published as Opus 103. The final movement, which Haydn calls a Canon, is a puzzle to me because there is no way that it can be "canonized." Haydn, one of the greatest masters of the musical endgame, presents the end of his body of work for string quartet without making it come to a cadence. Wow.

The fragement Haydn uses of "Der Gries," a poem by Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim that he set for SATB choir, soloists, and keyboard as Hob. XXVc:5, ends with a semicolon in its original form:

Hin ist alle meine Kraft!
Alt und schwach bin ich;
Wenig nur erquicket mich
Scherz und Rebensaft!

Hin ist alle meine Zier!
Meiner Wangen Roth
Ist hinweggeflohn! Der Tod
Klopft an meine Thür!

Unerschreckt mach' ich ihm auf;
Himmel, habe Dank:
Ein harmonischer Gesang
War mein Lebenslauf!

Mimi on the First Day of Spring

Michael and I watched La Bohème on PBS last night. It was a performance recorded live on November 8 of 2025, and it is being broadcast for the first time now.

In light of an actor's comments (I have refrained from mentioning his name in previous posts, and will continue to do so) regarding the cultural validity of opera, I can't think of a better rebuttal to him and those who share his views than this performance of La Bohème (the link takes you to a place where you can watch it).

I have always loved the opera, but my experience with it has been either from an orchestra pit (where I couldn't see the stage), through reading a piano-vocal score with a translation, listening to recordings following the libretto, or watching select staged separate scenes. This was a first time for me to experience whole opera without any kind of distraction.

I loved being able to see such an excellent-in-every-way performance in my living room, with my husband (who was also seeing the opera for the first time), a full box of tissues, and an extra handkerchief. And as a full-blown adult I found that I brought much of what I have learned (through literature, music, and studying history) into the experience. I hear so much more after living an inner-voice string-player's life, and through writing music myself that I can marvel on a whole new level at how magical Puccini's orchestration and vocal writing is.

In this opera you get the greatest contrasts imaginable: the most intimate moments of deep emotional communication between lovers, two monologues that pass seamlessly into a duet, and an aria that a basso sings to his coat, presented here with tasteful serious devotion (my attention was drawn to the bassoon doubling, which might suggest to some directors and conductors a sense of the absurd). This was a believable love song, sung by an extraordinary basso. And then there are the raucous songs, dances, and banter that are more like vaudeville acts than what anyone would expect from a serious opera about love and death.

In contrast to the intimacy between Mimi and Rodolfo, where they seem to be the only two people on the earth, illuminated only by moonlight, Marcello and Musetta's on-stage relationship is never private. But Musetta's transformation from a person of ill repute into a truly great human being is front and center. Maybe the public Musetta was always different from the private Musetta (we will never know). She had to make a living, right? In my mind Marcello's only saving grace is that he can't help loving her.

The second act crowd scene in this production, which contrasts the intimate ending of the first act, is a marvel in every way. The stage is filled with people, action, props, storefronts, tables, animals, and a marching band of children snaking their way through a two-level crowd. There is extraordinary choral singing, and real dancers doing work that requires real skill: appearing to be clumsy, moving gracefully in an animal costume, and lifting people. 

In 1830s Paris (and for a long time before that) a woman without inherited wealth (property, that is, on which she would "earn" a certain amount of money on from rent) had to rely on men to care of her needs. She had very few ways to keep herself alive, unless she was a clever monster like Balzac's Cousin Bette. 

And if a woman inherited a great deal of wealth, she couldn't have access to it unless she was married. Consider the case of Winneretta Singer (the Princesse de Polignac), who had a marriage of convenience with the titled-but-poor Prince de Polignac (both were gay), and used her wealth to promote musicians and commission music from composers. She even got a title, and the freedom that having vast amounts of money offers to live life on her terms. Most women didn't have her good fortune.

Beauty, if you had it, served as currency for women. Mimi and Musetta were/are two such women. In this opera they exist in a sea of male characters who present a buffet of negative male characteristics: self absorption, cluelessness regarding women and regarding relationships, jealousy, helplessness, and sentimentality that tell us a lot about the human condition in 1830s Paris. We can recognize these less-than-desirable male characteristics in the rich and powerful leaders of industry, government, and communications that elbow their way to our  televisions while we wait for a portion of the news, a video, or a movie to begin. 

We watch the cultural powers that be do their best to supress the rights that women (half the world's population) have worked for centuries to achieve and still struggle to maintain. Mimi asking Rodolfo whether she is still pretty just as she is about to die really drives the above point in the previous paragraph home for me.

Michael, who hadn't slept well the night before, was afraid that he might nod out during the opera. That didn't happen. Giocomo Puccini, Franco Zeffirelli (the director of the production), the fabulous cast, the astounding set designers and builders, and the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson didn't let it happen. If anything the absolute balance between emotional intensity and comic relief made watching an energizing and refreshing cathartic experience. There's nothing like a series of good cries to bring your feelings to the surface. All your feelings.

Experiencing the world through feeling and connection is what makes us human. Becoming reacquainted with those feelings through an opera like La Bohéme (i.e. Puccini's operas in general), reconnects each of us with our humanity.

That is why I know that I need to spend more time with the operas that I love. Fortunately there are a great many operas available through the PBS App that we have on our television (because we support PBS). And we have a great collection of DVDs both at home and at the local University library.

I cried real tears when Rodolfo cried in response to a selfless gesture of kindness from Musetta. And when Mimi died (it isn't a spoiler that she dies at the end), I cried for her and for her friends. But I also cried for what I fear: the end to funding from the federal government for musical organizations like the Metropolitan Opera, which cannot sustain itself on money from supporters alone (including corporate sponsors), that accessible ultra-high quality performances like this one might not be able to happen anymore. 

Mimi, who is music personafied, comes to the end of her life too soon because she hid the fact that she was sick (except she shared it with us, the audience), and wasn't able to get medical care (which may not have been able to save her). Paris in the 1830s suffered from food shortabes, food shortages, cost of living increases, and widespread cholera, that, in the spring of 1832 killed 100,000 people all over France (18,402 in Paris). 

There were, of course, many people who died because of lousy medical care. 

The real possibility of performances at this extraordinary level fading into memory comes because of a government that will not use its vast resources to fund arts institutions and make performances of operas affordable both for the audiences and for the people putting on the productions. Instead they threaten universities, systematically silence broadcasting companies, and flood disinformation, propaganda, gold coins, and ever-changing views of reality through preferred pipelines. I think of the squandered money that could have gone to so many organizations that have been dedicated to improving the lives of people in America, Many organizations have, until recently, kept the country from descending into something like the documented chaos that Paris (and Europe in general) experienced in the 1830s.

The lack of human rights, the ability of one person to get away with owning another person and disposing of that person when s/he is no longer of value that was still going strong during the middle of the ninetenth century suddenly doesn't feel like it was very long ago.  As they say, "What happened once upon a time happens all of the time."

Here's the link to the opera again. Remember, it isn't available after April 4th.

Haydn Sonata in E-flat L. 62 Hob. XVI:52

Haydn dedicated the 1798 Antara publication of his final Piano Sonata to Magdalene von Kurzbeck, but he wrote the piece four years earlier for the London-based pianist Therese Jansen Bartolozzi. The 1937 Peters edition (photographed above) has this Sonata as the first work of the first volume.

For some reason the first volume of my collection had been sleeping in a file cabinet. I found it yesterday, and playing through it, even with my rudimentary piano skills, was thrilling.

I wonder how many composers over the centuries have had the same reaction to the magic of this piece that I have. I wonder how many pianists over the centuries have felt the same series of thrills that I feel when playing this piece.

At first it was known only to Haydn. Then for four years it was known only to Therese Jansen Bartolozzi and the people she played it for. Then it was published, and was available to anyone with the money to buy it, or anyone with a friend who had the money to buy it.

Now it is available to hear on demand at the touch of a button, at any time of day, from anywhere in the world, played by great pianists, many of whom are no longer living.

Before the internets people all over Europe, and elsewhere in the world must have loved this piece as I do. And they would have loved it during times of peace and during times of war: the last year of the French Revolution (1789-1799) the Napoleonic Wars (1798–1815), the Second French Revolution (1830-1831), the Third French Revolution (1848-1849), the wars for Italian unification (1848-1870), the wars for German unification (1862-1871), the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russian Revolution (1905-1917), the Balkan Wars (1912-1914), World War I (1914–1918), the Russian Civil War (1918–1920), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), World War II (1939–1945), and the other wars that happened between 1900 and 1944, between 1945 and 1989, between 1990 and 2002, and the twenty-first-century wars documented on this Library of Congress website, which seems to need almost daily updating in order to account for the daily "feeling" in a certain leader's bones concerning where to strike next.

I am convinced that this Haydn Sonata will continue to shine its way through the dark times we face now and the dark times ahead. Without doing anything (except for being played and heard) it stood and sang as a jewel of joy, balance, emotional sensitivity, and communication through the worst of times in our shared past (because as members of the human race the past is something we all share, regardless of which "side" of a situation we might have sympathized with).

I like to think that my personal experience with the healing nature of Haydn might be shared by others through this piece. It helps me keep a light shining when things get dark and foggy. Maybe it might help you as well.

Perfect and Imperfect Storms

Freezing weather in March (snow today after huge high winds last night).

A deeply disturbing documentary we watched yesterday about the "manosphere."

David Markson's This Is Not a Novel.

"Golden" running through my head, making me cry, over and over again.

Cancer-fighting drugs surging through my system, making me aware of the magnitude of my physical state: this is far from easy, and far from over.

The state of the world, brought to humanity and other living things by a chaotic, unstable, craven, cartoon of a "man" who somehow is able to do whatever he wants to do.

The streamlined directness of Haydn.

The hope of Bach later today.

And the hope that tomorrow might be a little easier to bear.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra Situation

Reading the comments below this article in The Boston Musical Intelligencer is a good way to learn about the situation regarding the surprise and sudden termination of Andris Nelsons's contract. There are well over one hundred comments, many from regular audience members and BSO subscribers.

Matthew Guerrieri, of Soho The Dog fame, has made a substack post about the situation. Here is some of what Matthew has to say in his post called "M[r.] Nelson[s] is Missing"

I, too, have spent the past week wondering just what is going on at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. To recap: on March 6, the BSO Board of Trustees and president and CEO Chad Smith released a fairly terse statement announcing that the contract of music director Andris Nelsons would not be renewed, as conductor and organization “were not aligned on future vision.” The move apparently caught Nelsons by surprise (“not the decision I anticipated or wanted”) and was made without consulting the orchestra’s musicians. Theories as to why have coalesced around two possibilities:

a) Nelsons, who is also the Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, of late, has been spending a lot of we’re-just-good-friends quality-time with the Vienna Philharmonic, had stretched himself too thin to keep adequate eye on the store in Boston, with a corresponding drop-off in focus and quality (we’ll call this the “David Allen conjecture”)

b) Smith, who was hired away from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023, has been itching to revamp the BSO’s programming into something more like LA’s, with more pops-leaning crossovers and post-modern, audience-friendly new music, but has been stymied by Nelsons’ insistent devotion to the European canon (we’ll call this the “you’re-not-from-here postulate”)

You can debate these on the merits (Allen’s diagnosis of decline, for example, might be a bit of correlation-causation confusion; from the start, Nelsons struck me as a kind of Reggie Jackson of conductors—lots of home runs, lots of strikeouts). To be sure, there have been hints that a Smith-Nelsons partnership was not built for the long-term. But that still doesn’t explain the abruptness of the announcement. (Pure speculation, but my own wager would be that this has a great deal to do with the imminent departure of vice president of artistic planning Anthony Fogg, who is retiring in September, leaving an enormous hole in the BSO’s administrative apparatus. If CEO and music director were in a high-noon standoff over Fogg’s replacement, I could see the board panicking and turning an “ease him out” situation into a “rip the band-aid off” situation. But again: pure speculation.)

Among the Nelsons-friendly and more Boston-centric comment boards I’ve been perusing, Smith already has been cast as the heavy in this drama, a top-down corporate outsider imposing an unwelcome agenda. (This take assumes that the unaligned future vision mentioned in the board’s announcement is option b) up there.) Out of curiosity, I went back and took a look at the trustee-board committee that picked Smith to be the CEO. It looked like this: medical research institute administrator, foundation director, arts administrator, corporate governance lawyer, private equity partner, philanthropist, and arts administrator (and former BSO member). It’s a group, I think, symptomatic of the tension at the heart of American orchestra governance, where governing boards are expected to be fundraising machines, fiduciary watchdogs, and artistic stewards all at the same time. On the one hand: if you’re hiring an administrator, that’s the kind of expertise you want in the room. On the other hand: that’s a largely corporate crowd, making a corporate decision-by-committee—not exactly a recipe for out-of-the-box innovation. It’s probably going to land on a corporate candidate.

(Incidentally, lest you think that a gathering like that is some sort of 21st-century late-capitalist perversion of the BSO’s mission, here’s the lineup of BSO trustees ca. 1950: lawyer, judge, investment banker, paper executive, real estate broker and philanthropist, church administrator, car dealer and politician, investment banker, advertising executive, lawyer and academic, media executive, education administrator, lawyer, judge, lawyer. That there were at least three people on Smith’s hiring committee with professional-level musical training is significant progress, for what it’s worth.)

Still, if Smith really is aiming to plug-and-play some facsimile of the LA Phil ethos in Boston, he might want to sit down over a two-hot-dog combo with one of the people who hired him.

Joshua Lutzker—the private equity guy in that list—has been a BSO trustee since 2014. He is a managing director at Boston-based Berkshire Partners. In 2014, Berkshire Partners, in a deal worth right around a billion dollars, acquired Portillo’s, a Chicagoland chain of hot-dog-and-Italian-beef stands. Lutzker was part of the team than landed the deal, and he has served on the Portillo’s board of directors ever since, shepherding the company through both an IPO and a nationwide expansion. (Though it was announced just this week that, with the appointment of a new CEO, Lutzker will be leaving the board. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, etc.)

The Substack has links, images, and charts, plus a look at Portillos as an economic entity. I think I have eaten at Portillos in Chicago, and I have not eaten at the one that recently opened in Champaign, Illinois. If I did eat there, I don't remember much about the food, and I certainly do not have the wherewithal to analyze the financial stuff concerning the business.

I am very grateful to Matthew, who grew up in Chicago, understands a great deal about music, and understands a great deal more about how the financial world works than I do, for offering his far more than two cents about this situation.

My Two Cents on the Actor who Doesn’t Like Ballet and Opera

The musical internets are all abuzz about two sentences an actor uttered in an interview concerning his lack of use for ballet or opera. I learned from Michael that this guy (I keep forgetting his name, and have no desire to look it up or plant a link in this post) played the role of Bob Dylan in a recent bio-pic. Unlike many of my peers, I have no interest in Bob Dylan. I thought the film was well made, and well acted, but it did nothing to assuage my lack of appreciation for Dylan, his work in music, or in what has been lauded as his poetry.

I love a great many ballets and a great many operas. I also love the art of ballet, and I love the way ballet teaches people to move their bodies in disciplined, expressive, musical, communicative, and athletic ways. And ballet doesn't necessarily depend on a set repertoire of  “old” music. Ballet companies use all kinds of music for their productions. Sadly not enough of the music that people dance to is made in real time by musicians who are paid for their time and talent, because production costs are too high to hire musicians for performances. Recorded music, even with fees, can work within ballet company’s budget.

My love of opera has a lot to do with loving the music and drama of specific operas, and the deep level of escape that a well-written, well-staged, and well-performed opera gives to me. And I also love the fact that I can listen to a recording of an opera with the libretto, and I can imagine a theater in my head. And when I write operas the theater in my head increases in dimension and in scope, and lets my imagination become boundless.

I have had the opportunity for music I have written be used for ballet, and someday I hope to see and hear one of my operas staged and performed somewhere other than in the theater in my head.

The “death” of institutions that participate in what has had to become the business of classical music pops up its ugly head every once in a while. And this time it comes at a time when we have incredibly high levels of playing, singing, teaching, and scholarship, and when composers are continuing to write excellent, challenging, and expressive new music (in contrast to what people were working with during the serially dominated part of the twentieth century, when tonality and modality were considered either old-fashioned or uninteresting).

My father always said that people will always have musical institutions and religious institutions. I think that he was correct. And people benefit in all kinds of ways by participating in musical activities and musical communities (particularly school orchestras, music school ensembles, bands, and choruses) when they are young.

An encounter I had in high school comes to mind. One of my chorus mates also played the flute a little bit. She asked if she could try mine, and asked what kind it was. I told her that it was a Haynes. She said, "Oh, they make great pantyhose," and blew into my instrument. 

My high school wardrobe consisted of overalls and painter's pants (from the men's section of the Sears Catalog), and I had no more business wearing pantyhose than my friend had playing a Haynes flute.

I believe that this chorus mate grew up to become a pediatrician who designed solar-powered equipment which she brought to areas of Africa that didn’t have conventional electrical power, and thereby improved and saved countless numbers of lives. 

Late (or is it early?) Morning Thoughts about Compromise

I recall last year's discussion in the halls of congress concerning switching from standard time to daylight savings time did not have a Democratic vs. Republican division. Nobody likes changing the their clocks twice a year (and, if you are like me, nobody remembers exactly how you set the microwave clock, even though you do it twice a year). Nobody likes the day of adjustment it takes to let your body know when to wake up and when to go to sleep.

But there are serious geographical and agricultural issues that come into play. The United States of America has people living and businesses operating in the tropical state of Hawaii, and also in Alaska, up in the Arctic Circle.

So, in this time of intense political divide concerning just about everything we can imagine, and things we can't imagine that keep surprising us upon waking, and then disturb our sleep.

I don't think that anybody on the news is going to be talking about whether to establish a single time for the whole United States of America this year, or in the near future. 

Everybody, for as long as I can remember, has compromised. We have adjusted our work lives and our personal lives in ways that allow people in every part the country an adequate amount of daylight.

So this year's spring into daylight savings time is almost a pleasure: a kind act of compromise for the greater good.

"In the Gold Room," "A Bird in Gilded Cage," and "Asleep in the Deep" performance!

I got to hear a livestream concert from the Tenth International Music by Women Festival yesterday that included a performance of these three pieces I wrote for voice, flute, and piano (the video is set to start just as soprano Lydia Beasley Kneer, flutist Brittney Patterson, and pianist Laurie Middaugh are ready to play). It was particularly exciting for me to hear these three pieces performed as a set.

The flutist is not playing a gold flute, but because the concert is being held in a gold room, golden reflections glint off the flute. There is something just right about that. Here is the text for the first song, which is a poem by Oscar Wilde.

In the Gold Room: A Harmony

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Rustle their pale-leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.

Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold
Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun
On the burnished disk of the marigold,
Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun
When the gloom of the dark blue night is done,
And the spear of the lily is aureoled.

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.

Harry von Tilzer wrote "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" with Arthur Lamb in 1899, and I made a setting of Arthur Lamb's lyric in 2009 as part of a series I thought of as being "new tunes for old songs." Here is the text (which also has a lot of gold in it):

It shone with a thousand lights,
And there was a woman who passed along,
The fairest of all the sights,
A girl to her lover then softly sighed,
There's riches at her command;
But she married for wealth, not for love, he cried,
Though she lives in a mansion grand.

She's only a bird in a gilded cage,
A beautiful sight to see,
You may think she's happy and free from care,
She's not, though she seems to be,
'Tis sad when you think of her wasted life,
For youth cannot mate with age,
And her beauty was sold,
For an old man's gold,
She's a bird in a gilded cage.

I stood in a churchyard just at eve',
When sunset adorned the west,
And looked at the people who'd come to grieve,
For loved ones now laid at rest,
A tall marble monument marked the grave,
Of one who'd been fashion's queen,
And I thought she is happier here at rest,
Than to have people say when seen,

She's only a bird in a gilded cage,
A beautiful sight to see,
You may think she's happy and free from care,
She's not, though she seems to be,
'Tis sad when you think of her wasted life,
For youth cannot mate with age,
And her beauty was sold,
For an old man's gold,
She's a bird in a gilded cage.

Tilzer's song was wildly popular. My setting expresses Arthur Lamb's text very differently.

Lamb also wrote the words for Henry W. Petrie's 1897 song "Asleep in the Deep." It is best known as a novelty song to show off the voice of a low bass singer. They lyrics are very dark, but the original setting of them is ironically light. I wanted to express the darkness of the text, so instead of a bass voice, I opted for the lower partials of the soprano voice. I also wanted to capture the movemnt of the waves in a dialogue between the piano and the flute, and wanted to make the bell-ringing in the refrain of the song a prominant musical motive.

Here is the text:

Stormy the night and the waves roll high, bravely the ship doth ride; Hark!
While the lighthouse bell's solemn cry rings o'er the sullen tide.
There on the deck see two lovers stand, heart to heart beating and hand in hand,
Though death be near, she knows no fear, while at her side is the one ever dear.

Loudly the bell in the old tower rings
Bidding us list to the warning it brings.
Sailor take care! Sailor take care!
Danger is near thee, beware! Beware!
Beware! Beware!

Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep so beware! Beware!

What of the storm when the night is o'er? There is no trace or sign!
Save where the wreckage hath strewn the shore, peaceful the sun doth shine.
But when the wild raging storm did cease, under the billows two hearts found peace.
No more to part, no more of pain, the bell may now toll its warning in vain.

Loudly the bell in the old tower rings
Biding us list to the warning it brings.
Sailor take care! Sailor take care!
Danger is near thee, beware! Beware!
Beware! Beware!

Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep so beware! Beware!
Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep so beware! Beware!

You can find the music for "Asleep in the Deep" on this page of the IMSLP, the music for "In the Gold Room" on this page (with a few alternate transcriptions), and the music for "A Bird in a Golden Cage" on this page.

Cause and (Side) Effect

Conventional wisdom tells us that life is a kind of "garbage-in-garbage-out" situation, but personal experience of late has taught me that when you are sick and are on a bunch of medications, there seems to be very little in the way of rhyme or reason to how a person might feel from day to day, or even from hour to hour.

Am I sleeping more because my body is reacting to the medications I take? Do I feel slightly better (a whole lot better, actually) in my head because I am getting a lot of sleep? Am I thirsty all the time because my body craves water in order to get my blood chemistry into the normal range, or is it a side effect of a medication?

Yesterday I worked on the Bach Chaconne on the violin. I love my violin. She (I named her Antonia) has probably played it before, but this was the first time she has played it with me. The difficulties I have had with the Chaconne in the past, playing it on my Bearden violin, and playing it on the viola, were not there. I could, for the first time, wrap my head and hands harmonically around what was happening in real time.

Is this because of the violin? Is this because I have been getting enough sleep? Is this because I have been spending a lot of quality time at the piano playing Bach, Mozart, and Haydn? Is it because the tumor that had been filling my days and nights with pain has been obliterated by radiation?

I am in my third week of treatment (three of eighteen), and it is an "off" week for the strong oral cancer medication that I take for the first two weeks of each cycle.

And now it is time to go off to get an infusion of whatever drugs my great team of doctors gives me.