Forty-two years ago today

Right after our wedding (forty-two years ago today), my Aunt Phyllis told me that everything begins now. At the time I didn't understand. Michael and I had been living together for a while before we were married, and lots of things had happened in my life.

Now I understand intimately what she meant: life as a "we" begins when you get married. It is the beginning of a team effort, where two people form a new family that is stronger than its component parts. And going through life with someone who always has your back helps to make enduring the difficulties we all encounter (health, government, cruelty, unfairness, etc.) possible.

Thank you for being my safety net, my hype man, my partner in parenting and grandparenting, my fellow traveler in bloggery, my reading partner, my partner in all meals, and my partner on walks in all seasons in all places.

Local Music

It just dawned on me the other night (at Rebecca and Cara's concert), that I have written just about all my music and just about all of my arrangements in our 1,500 square foot home that sits on a little hill in our small Illinois town. And then I started thinking of places that I have lived, and how different every place sounded.

I associate memories of Newton, Massachusetts with the sound of my father practicing Bach, and recordings: Bach Cantatas from Germany (DGG Archiv), music from the Renaissance that was being recorded by the pioneers of historically informed performance, Brahms and Schumann chamber music recordings from the small collection of old recordings that my parents kept in a small cabinet, recordings of music by Charles Ives that “smelled” of New England, the great 1970s popular music that was played on radios in every store, and in every car (except for our car when I wasn't driving), and my own constant practicing.

I don't remember much in the way of birdsong, but I do remember reading that Sibelius felt that birdsong influenced the way music sounded in various countries. Even though our house was located on the edge of a park, the only birds I remember hearing were robins and crows.

Beyond Newton, there was the music of the trolley (now called the “T”), and those sounds accompanied me as I traveled to concerts and rehearsals. Many of the concerts I heard included atonal music, but I mostly associate atonal music with Tanglewood, where I spent my summers. The “brown” mixture of twelve-tone music, avant-garde music, orchestral music, and the din of many different people practicing is oddly comforting to me. The memory of that sound is somehow married to the memory of the smell of the Tanglewood mud that has been permeated over the decades with cigar smoke. I wanted to be a composer when I spent time at Tanglewood, but I knew that I couldn't be creative in avant-garde or twelve-tone ways of writing. I hoped, even then, that tonality would return to be an acceptable tool for writing music.

The sounds of New York were mostly sounds of my own practicing and the hum of the Juilliard heating and air conditioning system. I found New York to be the place I lived with the least room for creativity, but the best place I have lived for learning about the creativity of others. The music that filled the air in the parks and in the streets vibrated with excitment and rhythm, but it usually drowned out whatever original ideas I thought I might have had.

But I did start to write my first piece there. It was an Elegy for a dear friend who had died. We had been studying Bartok String Quartets in a class, and I guess the idea of setting the musical idea I had in my head for string quartet seemed right. I believe my “piece” was sixteen measures or so. I finished it in 2003, when I had the space to develop my ideas.

The next place I lived was Schladming, Austria. I remember walking in the woods there, and “hearing” Schubert in the trickling of the streams, and in the Enns river. The birds might have even been singing Schubert songs. It was my first experience hearing local music that I felt came from the earth. When I moved to Vienna, I heard different music in the air. I wrote about it in a post from 2005 (two decades ago!), and will share an excerpt here:

Music is hanging around the air in Vienna. It always has been there, and it probably will always be there. Fritz Pauer told me that it has something to do with the water that flows in the underwater canals. Even in the silence of the night in Vienna, there is a certain musical rhythm in the air. Anyway, one day while I was walking in Vienna I started singing a tune. I figured it must have been something that I heard, but I couldn't place it. I sang it for Leo [Leo Wright], and he had never heard it before either. He helped me harmonize it with jazz chords, and I let it rattle around in my brain for about 20 years until I turned it into a piece for string quartet that I called “Good-bye to Vienna.” Of course I dedicated it to Leo, who is no longer alive in body, but will always be alive in spirit.

After Vienna I lived in Hong Kong, which “sounded” like New York to me. And whatever creative expression I might have had when I lived there was drowned out by a great deal of struggle and a great deal of artifice. I returned to Boston, and was happy to see (and hear) that the city sounded pretty much the same as it sounded when I was growing up. It looks different now (forty years later), but the T still makes the same sound, and there is still a feeling of musical possibility in the air.

As much as I would like to hear music in the air in Chicago, it has never happened for me. But when visiting Los Angeles (where our daughter used to live) the air seems to vibrate with major seventh chords. Even if I could afford to live there, I would never get any work done if I did.

My home in Illinois (for the past four decades) has given me the greatest creative space I could ever ask for. The local natural world, with its various bodies of running water, like the creek in our backyard and the Embarass river, reminds me a little of the music in the air in the hills around Schladming as well as the music below the surface of the earth in Vienna. The bird life around here contains a universe of songs. Every imaginable migrating species seems to pass through our area, and our yard is lively with birdsong at every time of the year. The landscape sings to me, particularly in late August and in September.

I wrote a piece called “Coles County August” which grew out of the kind of light and natural excitement that happens here every August. And I am happy to share a performance of it by Coles County pianist Kara Huber. She grew up here in rural Illinois, and now has an international career as a solo pianist.

This area has also given me more playing opportunities than I could have ever expected from the other places I have lived. I had the opportunity to remake myself as an instrumentalist, because I have had the time and space to practice and learn. I enjoy playing in orchestras, in string quartets, and in an early music group. I also get to write arrangements for our local Summer Strings orchestra to play for the community. Making a dozen or so new arrangements every year for practical use by local string players keeps me challenged and stimulated year after year. I have also been able to write music for some terrific professional musicians in the area, some who live within driving distance (some even within walking distance), and some who have passed through, and moved away.

The Third Time is the Charm

The (twice-cancelled) concert of flute and piano music written by women that Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning are playing tonight is being live-streamed. The concert begins at 7:30 Central Standard Time.



On the program (see below), is my transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration," as well as my Piccolo Sonata.

Reality Check

The UK-based Donne organization just put together a report concerning performances of musical works programmed during the 2025-2026 concert season by a large selection of professional orchestras from all over the world. Here are a few images from their report:

[click the images for a larger view]

You can find the whole PDF here.

Portrait of my father's Breschian viola

Violists Masumi Per Rostand and Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt have devoted a half-hour-long video (with lovely close-up images) to the Breschian viola my father played during his career as the principal violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that is now owned by Pajaro-van de Stadt. Make sure to watch to the end to hear the instrument's amazing C string!

Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur

Whether you celebrate Yom Kippur or not, the Kol Nidre prayer is a prayer of release and renewal. It releases us from the vows and unfulfilled promises we have made, and allows us to move forward with a clean conscience. Louis Lewandowski's melodic setting of the prayer (even without the words), provides a kind of catharsis for me when I play it, and, I have been told, provides a kind of catharsis for people who are listening.

I have put transcriptions of it on this page of the IMSLP for solo violin, solo viola, solo viola d'amore, and solo cello, as well as a duo transcription for instruments that are unable to play double stops.

A lot of my published music is now being sold through J.W. Pepper

Music published by Subito is now being sold through the J.W. Pepper website, and that means that the eighty pieces of mine published by Seesaw, that are distributed by Subito, are available to buy there.

Also Trevco, the publisher that specializes in double-reed music, stopped its operations earlier this year, and their inventory was taken over by Subito. That means my contrabasson music is now available through the J.W. Pepper website.

J.W. Pepper also sells music published by the International Music Company, so all of the arrangements, transcriptions, and editions I worked on for IMC are there as well.

You can see what they have of mine through this link (I already put the search in for you).

Conventional Wisdom on this Rosh Hashanah Eve

I have been thinking about this bit of conventional wisdom from Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who lived in a world where mass communication meant talking to a roomful of people, or writing something down on a single piece of parchment that might be read out loud to a roomful of people, some who may have been scribes.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

I work very hard at what I do. I practice, write music, make arrangements, teach, and rehearse. I try to advocate for myself as a musician, and I do what I can to make the fruits of my work available for people to play. I believe that the purpose of my work in music is to share my love for it, and I hope the material I write and arrange can inspire other musicians to communicate with one another, and to be comfortable expressing themselves while playing together.

I believe that doing what you do as well as possible to make work that speaks for itself leads to a fulfilling life. Coleridge wrote, “Nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.” I wrote a post about my experience with that statement in 2012, and I stubbornly still believe it is true.

I have met a great many people in and out of the world of music who have made it their business to tell me just how accomplished, successful, and important they are. I guess they would fall into the "If I am only for myself, what am I?" category. I decided early on that this was not the kind of person I wanted to be.

That "only for myself" way of thinking casts a large a shadow over the "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" concept, and, as a result of the conflict, I often hesitate to advocate for myself in the larger musical world. When I do, I am often disappointed by not getting a response (even from publishers I work with). I suppose business people are selective about who is worth their time, particularly when there are so many people and computer-generated entities vying for their attention.

Hillel's last question, "And if not now, when?" has never made sense to me in the context of the first two questions. 

But it stands alone as a great piece of wisdom.

Speaking of standing alone, Hillel's explanation of the Torah while standing on one foot: not to do anything to your fellow man that is hateful to you, is, perhaps, the best conventional wisdom of all.

L'shanah tovah

The Wannabe Classical Music Aficionado

This 254-page book, published by Soncata Press, is a well-organized guide to classical music aimed at enticing the novice listener to abandon their preconceptions and fears, and give concert-going a try. It is divided into forty-six well-organized "insights" that help the reader learn the vocabulary used to discuss classical music, understand the roles of instruments found in orchestras, chamber music groups, and choirs, and learn a little about some of the best-known composers that a concert-going novice might encounter.

There are insights (chapters) that discuss the concert experience: what to wear, where to sit, when to clap, etc., and insights that explore ways of deepening the concert experience. I particularly like the insight about going to concerts alone, and how rewarding it can be.

The book includes a hefty section about chamber music, and suggests ways of paying attention to how people in a chamber ensemble communicate. In addition to a section that discusses how musicians live and work (i.e. practice, rehearse, and perform), there is a section about the economics of musical organizations. We also get a glossary of terms as well as an index.

The ideas in the book come from Allan Schiller, who played in the violin section of the New York Philharmonic from 1964 (he got his position when Leonard Bernstein was the music director) until 1999, but the writing and the organization is by Ann Marie Sabath, a person who has a great deal of experience writing books that introduce people to matters of investing, managing money, business etiquette, and even writing books.

I think that this pairing of a seasoned professional musician with a professional writer (who is not a musician) is very successful. The book is very well written, extremely easy to read, and the pages are beautifully designed. Each chapter (insight) begins with an excellent and appropriate quotation, and ends with a meaningful statement of "wannabe wisdom" that is applicable to the experience of a person new to classical music as well as to a person who has been listening to classical music for decades.

You can find out more here.