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.