Marshall Fine String Quartet #2 "Songs of Love and Death"

I now have PDF copies of music that my brother Marshall sent to our father. It is a real honor to be able to make it available for people to play. This is the first of several pieces in manuscript I will be sharing this way.

You can find the score and the parts here, and on this page of the IMSLP.

The "L" Word

I got a box from my father's attic in the mail today. It had music that Marshall sent to our father in it, along with several pieces of music that I had sent him over the years. The pieces from Marshall were accompanied by letters that included birthday greetings.

The music has clearly never played. Neither his music nor mine.

One of the pieces was Marshall's Bass Sonata, which I ended up finding the music for several years after he died. During the last afternoon I spent with my father, we listened to the performance of the piece together (linked to above). I'm not sure what it meant to my father, but it meant a lot to me.

I will go through the rest of the music and get everything, particularly the physically larger pieces, properly scanned into PDF files, and then submit them to the IMSLP. Among other things, there's a concerto for two violas, and a viola concerto that look very interesting.

Reading the letters made me realize how desperately Marshall wanted to know that our father loved him. Our father never used "the L word." Now I wonder if he simply lacked the ability to love. He could be charming, clever, and even kind, but expressing love in spoken or written language was not part of who he was.

Marshall was drawn to the kind of "fatherly" love that is promised in Christianity, but my younger brother and I managed to find other ways to cope with the absence of paternal love in our lives.

I wonder how much of the dysfunction in the world has to do with people who, like my father, are unable to express love to the people closest to them. Maybe my father didn't use the word because he felt it was a false expression. Perhaps if love was something that my father was unable to feel, it was something that didn't really exist. And if he used the word, it would be a lie. My father was never good at lying.

I have experience with the use of the word love to manipulate and deceive. And I know that love can be obsessive, particularly when it is unrequited. (What else do we use the term "unrequited" for?)

For some people the pain of losing someone you love is the pain of losing love itself, and then comes the dread of living in a world without love. I know that the ability to let someone go, as in accepting the inevitability of someone's death, is an act of love. I experienced that together with my father when Marshall died.

The last thing I said to Marshall before he died was that I loved him.

I suppose I really learned how to love through knowing I was loved. I was so fortunate to meet Michael when I did, and am grateful that in our life together we have been able to have a relationship where the phrase "I love you" is part of our daily household vocabulary.

When our first child was born, her ability to love was beyond anything I had ever experienced. And then our second child taught us even more ways of expressing deep love. Both of our children have taught me how to love deeply and organically. The ability to love that both of them demonstrate as parents fills me with admiration and awe on a daily basis.

That I spent my childhood in a family that didn't express or recognize love and have been able to spend my adulthood in a family filled with feelings and expressions of love is really something to celebrate.

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola

I grew up hearing my father practice the solo viola part of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante. Back in the days when he was the principal violist of the Boston Symphony, the programming of viola concertos was extremely rare. Actually concerto performances by any of the principal players besides the concertmaster were few and far between. My father never performed the Bartok, the Walton, or the Hindemith with the Boston Symphony, but he did, as I recall, play the Bartok with a regional orchestra, and he performed the Hindemith at Tanglewood with the Berkshire Music Center orchestra. He also played concertos from time to time with the Boston Pops, and played a couple of concertos using the viola d'amore.

But he did perform the Mozart with the Boston Symphony.

I remember the circumstances of the performance he talks about in this interview, and I remember him talking about the scordatura solo viola part, which involves tuning the instrument up half a step and playing the piece as if it were written in D major. But I believe he was interested in learning it using scordatura around that time, but opted to go with what he had spent decades practicing because of the short notice.

You can hear him play a (very) short bit from the second movement here.

Our local university orchestra is having a performance of the piece in March. The violin professor, who comes from Korea, will be performing it with a violist friend from Korea. The viola part in the orchestra is divided into two parts, and I have been coming to rehearsals to play the (vital and very interesting) second viola part.

The first rehearsal I went to was difficult for me. There were too many (sad and beautiful) memories of my father involved, particularly because of the absence of the solo viola. I thought I could "take it," but I was wrong. The piece haunts my dreams. Literally.

So, to steel myself I have decided to learn the solo viola part. And I have been learning it in what I consider the original (the way I remember him practicing it), not in the scordatura.

Practicing it has been interesting and wonderful. The fingerings seem, somehow, to suggest themselves. And I love the second position options and the way half-step shifts add to the expressive gestures in the music.

I have told the violin professor that if he ever wants to read through the two solo parts together, I would be game. I think it might help "innoculate" me against at least a few bouts of tears. We will see. The important thing is connecting with the music itself, and doing so using the instrument and the bow that my father used when he first learned the piece.

Louis Casimir-Ney, brought to you by guest blogger and guest violist Marshall Fine

My brother Marshall Fine (1956-2014) made recordings of the extremely difficult solo viola preludes by Louis Casimir Ney (1801-1877). Marshall, being beyond brilliant in some ways and rather naive in others, thought that by putting these recordings on the iTunes application on his computer, he was sharing them online. I must confess that I was confused about it for a while as well (why was the name used for different purposes?), so I understand his confusion.

Years ago Marshall sent me a CD of his recordings of these Preludes, but it was only the other day that I realized I have the mp4 files he made which I rescued from his computer after his accident. His laptop, which was in the van, was in sleep mode, so I was able to extract all the extractable files from it.

You can listen to the recordings he made through this link:

Louis Casimer-Ney Preludes played by Marshall Fine

Here are Marshall's program notes:

L. E. CASIMIR-NEY: THE 24 PRELUDES FOR SOLO VIOLA, op. 22

Louis Casimir-Ney (1801-1877) is one of the greatest enigmas in music. To begin, his birth: he claimed illegitimate descent from Napoleon’s fieldmarshal, Michel Ney (renaming himself from his original, Louis-Casimir Escoffier). Next, his career: he was well-known in Paris salons as a quartet violist and friend of the pianist, Charles-Valentin Alkan--he transcribed Alkan’s Sonate de concert op. 47 from cello to viola. Unfortunately the Alkan transcription and the Preludes op. 22 appear to be his only extant music. Other pieces, though mentioned in records (such as the op. 18 Etudes for the G-string only of the violin), have no copy available. The Richault edition of the Preludes (1860) is poor: wrong notes, missing accidentals, even errors in tempos. Several metronome markings are missing the flag from what is evidently an eighth-note beat, most flagrantly in nos. 10 and 13. Worst of all, research on Casimir-Ney is still rudimentary. He has no entry in either Grove’s Dictionary or MGG. The American and International Viola Societies apparently know the most about him, contributing most to the online Wikipedia entry for him which is the best entry of any kind.

That this musical enigma should have left behind a collection of legendary and notorious difficulty--a cycle through the keys in the style of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Chopin op. 28 Preludes, as well--is therefore nothing short of miraculous. To this is added the sheer size of the cycle. At over 110 minutes it dwarfs every other cycle before or since, except the Bach and the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues op. 87. (Even my own Rock Etudes op. 114, which I completed and recorded directly before the Casimir-Ney cycle, is only twelve movements, and designed at some 45 minutes to fit on the second half of a recital program.)

Analysis of the Preludes shows why they are the stuff of legend. They are no mere bagatelles, but fully worked-out forms. Only one, no. 2 in A minor, is less than 2 1/2 minutes. Several are over 6 minutes (no. 20, over 8:00). To accommodate the extreme range--up to g’’’--Casimir-Ney invents a new clef, a sort of two-sided treble clef, to denote an octave above treble. (A similar system, using “phi” and “sigma” clefs, was invented about 1970 by the Savannah, Georgia savant Ted Bryan-Turner.) Double-stopping and chord problems of all kinds abound, tantamount to a true string polyphony in two voices. Some of these are tenths only soluble by using high positions; and in one conspicuous place, in no. 7, there is an outrageous twelfth in a low position, on the basis of which it is usually surmised that Casimir-Ney used a very small instrument. This and a similar passage in tenths in no. 8 are the only two passages that I have changed in this recording. Casimir-Ney even invents new techniques. In no. 20 he requires pizzicato with all four fingers, one on each string, a device not even Hindemith, in the 1937 solo sonata, could duplicate exactly. And in no. 10, he invents a new bowing technique, best described as a “portato-tremolo” because the notes are bowed in pairs unlike a normal tremolo.

The compendium of established techniques, plus new ones thrown in, is still not enough to interpret Casimir-Ney pro-perly. A too-literal approach results in disaster--this alone has probably given him his reputation of unplayability. One must know his derived forms and style concepts, all of which--absorbed from Paris of his day--reveal him as a consummate musical sophisticate. Nos. 1, 7, 14, 15, 19, and 23 are two-part forms derived from grand opera. Others, such as nos. 6, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21, and 24 are purely symphonic. In no. 17 in A-flat, he develops an alternative tonal scheme avoiding the dominant--modulating instead to E and C. For all these, the solo viola is clearly his orchestra and it is his aim to wring every available sonority from it.

But mostly these preludes derive from Chopin, with whom he was contemporary (from the the list of subscribers, which include Joseph Massart and George Onslow, they can be dated between 1843-1852, pending further research). The melos is astonishingly Chopinesque. Knowledge of Chopin’s slancio and rubato have helped me avoid the overliteral approach and allow time where needed, indeed demanded. The forms are reproduced with astounding effect and authenticity. Nos. 6 and 18 are nocturnes in extended song-forms. Nos. 9 and 17 are polonaise/rondos, the former in addition being written out entirely in three-bar phrases. No. 16 is a somber mazurka that changes in the middle to a giddy, phantasmagoric waltz. Nos. 10 and 12 are highly expressive laments. In no.12 the 4/4 main theme is set off by more flowing episodes in 3/4. The former is a funeral march whose main theme is transfigured dramatically in the recapitulation by the “portato-tremolo” bowing. No. 8 is in places (notably the end) very close to the G minor ballade. And no. 22 is an extended tone-poem, also in ballade style with six sections, capturing the mood of Rossini’s William Tell in a central “storm” section followed by a ranz de vaches coda wholly in harmonics, interrupted briefly by the severely truncated recapitulation.

Indeed, the one form Casimir-Ney eschews is sonata-form, a curiosity in itself since Chopin’s command of the form is sure and dramatic. And one must concede that he knows what he is doing. Only one prelude, no. 24 in D minor, uses sonata-form to any degree; and I believe he intends to mock it. There is no development section, only three chords that make a quick retransition; and after four or five notes of the second theme recapitulation--his sole gesture towards the form--he “pulls his punch” and enters the coda.

Bruch Four Pieces from Opus 84

This recently digitized recording from a Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert given on December 1, 1974 somewhere in Boston (Jordan Hall or Sanders Theater, possibly) of four of Max Bruch's eight pieces for viola, clarinet, and piano (published in 1910 as Opus 84) is incredibly beautiful. We get to hear clarinetist Harold Wright, pianist Gilbert Kalish, and violist Burton Fine (my father) play chamber music the way I remember chamber music sounding when I was growing up. In the course of adulthood I thought that I might have had an inflated nostalgic memory of how beautifully my father and his colleagues played these Bruch pieces.

Now, when I listen with the ears of an adult musician as well as with the ears of a violist, I find that their playing is even more beautiful than I remembered it to be.

I imagine that you, my blog-reading friends, will share my enthusiasm.

Musical Dynasties

I came across an interesting article by Jeffrey Arlo Brown in Friction concerning the barriers to success that not coming from a musical family poses. The title of the article, "On Being a First Generation Classical Musician," echoes the perceived stigma of being the first person in a family to go to college. My parents, grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe, were the first generation in both of their families to go to college. It was part of the "American Dream," and college was available and affordable to people who worked hard in high school and lived at home. I don't recall an option for college when I was growing up other than "where."

My father looked at my SAT scores (results from a test I took without preparation in the beginning of my junior year of high school) and said it was a good thing I was going to music school. I really wanted to go to Oberlin where I hoped I could enter through the conservatory and make my way into the college. I got into the conservatory, but not the college. I spent the bulk of my teenage years practicing, which was not an unusual thing to do in my family.

I probably got into Juilliard because of my parents. They didn't do anything, but my father had a prominent position as a principal in one of the big five American orchestras, and my mother had studied flute with the teacher I wanted to study with. He always liked her name: June Blume. So I got in.

There were certainly "legacies" at Juilliard like the Rostropovich daughters, the Barere daughters, and the Greitzer daughters, but the majority of successful students at Juilliard had parents who were not connected with music. Their parents supported them by giving them good instruments, driving them to lessons, and making sure that they practiced. These are parents who instilled a work ethic in their children, applying the same "rules" that applied in the extra-musical world to a musical one.

When I was a teenage flutist I used to marvel at the way my great friend Liz Mann's parents used to support her musical activities. Liz's mother played a little piano, but she was a business person. Her father was too. Liz, who was extraordinarily talented and capable, grew up in an environment where "work ethic" was key. And that got translated into cultivating relationships. Her parents loved the fact that her daughter was friends with the child of a local musical celebrity. I was happy that Liz was my friend because she was a lovely person and a terrific musician. She was clearly from a higher economic class than I could ever imagine being in, so her possibilities for a future in music were not hampered by the usual practical things that get in the way, like having to get a job outside of music in order to pay the rent.

Jeffrey Arlo Brown asserts that people from musical families have an easier time with things like ear training. I don't think so. Everyone without absolute pitch struggles with the "training" part of ear training. But the struggle to know whether people like you because you are the child of someone "important" or whether you are a good person is real. And the constant questions about whether you measure up in musicianship and ability compared to your well-supported peers are real. And those struggles last for a lifetime.

I do have advantages. I know "from good." I heard it from infancy. My musical standards will always be high because they always have been high. And occasionally (though rarely) I live up to them. My official teachers haven't always been the best, but I have had the wherewithal to recognize people to learn from unofficially (i.e. friends). My business skills are terrible. Perhaps if I grew up with parents who taught me how to "network," I would have a commercially successful career. I have known people who are now in high places in the established hierarchies of the larger musical world, but I would never take advantage of those friendships and ask for favors. My built-in inferiority mechanism always takes precedence, because, like I mentioned above, I know from good.

So I would say to Jeffrey Arlo Brown that the advantages for me of growing up in a family of professional musicians were hanging out backstage at Tanglewood when I was a kid, thereby acquiring the skills of being able to enter any stage door and look like I belong (when I was a student I got into lots of concerts this way). The big advantage now of coming from a musical family is being able to talk with my father about the nuts and bolts of music, like the difficult passages in any given viola part. When I wrote CD reviews for the American Record Guide, I gave him a subscription to the magazine. He used to read the reviews I wrote, and he would call to discuss them with me. That was the best thing about writing reviews: it provided a way for me to communicate with my father. I love the fact that I can send him recordings of music I write with the score. Sometimes he has helpful and/or favorable things to say, and that means the world to me. And, thanks to his generosity, I have always had good instruments.

But, personalities aside, the advantages pretty much stop there. I have seen the ugly part of the professional classical music world for my whole life. I have never seen the classical music world as being safe from corruption, where dissonances resolve, and everyone is an "artist." It is a world filled with unfairness, pettiness, jealousy, lust, power, ego, ego, personal insecurity, more ego, disappointment, short-lived success, false hope, delusion, fakery, self promotion, rivalries, injuries, neuroses, and financial insecurity.

If you come from any other type of family, you can avoid expending the kind of extra emotional attention I do when new "creatures" from the underbelly of the musical world are exposed in the national news for their predatory behavior. I know people connected with almost all of them. And I know many more who haven't been exposed.

From Jeffrey Arlo Brown's perspective the grass over here looks greener, but I believe that the successful people he mentions in his article are outliers and exceptions.

Sometimes parents of students tell me that they have no idea where their child's interest in music comes from. I tell them that most children are musical, and I praise them for allowing that aspect of their child's life to flourish. I believe with all my heart that parents who support a child's interest in music contribute a great deal to the musical success of that child. And it doesn't matter whether the supporting parents are musicians or not. The guy in the article who was dancing the Hora around Jeffrey Kahane (Leonard Bernstein) was a first-generation musician who had to sneak behind his father's back to take piano lessons, but he had a mother who was proud of all her children, for whatever they did.

I'm All Ears

Errol Morris's New York Times Opinion piece about Sviatoslav Richter, "The Pianist and the Lobster," is a fantastic piece of writing about one of the most enigmatic of an enigmatic breed of great pianists. And it includes interviews with Richter's video biographer Bruno Monsaingeon and pianist (and illustrious member of the musical blogosphere) Jeremy Denk.

I knew about Richter's problems with pitch as he got older, but I was struck by the peculiar nature of the way Richter's sense of pitch changed. Then again, why should Richter, who functioned on the on outer expressive margins of musical possibilities, have an experience with physical changes in his hearing that wasn't singular?

ERROL MORRIS Hearing things a half tone up or down — was this also a problem related to depression?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON It was probably related to depression. But actually, he mentioned that a bit later in our conversations. One day in a hotel room in Paris, he went to the Clavinova [an electric practice piano] which he had in his room. We had great problems plugging the machine in. And finally he started playing the “Carmen” overture. And he said, “This is in A major, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, yes of course, Maestro.” But he was playing the left hand in B major. There was a separation in his mind between the left and the right hand. One was playing one key and another in another key. It must have been a real nightmare for him.

ERROL MORRIS How can you play a piece when you’re transposing only one hand into a different key?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Well, that’s why he stopped. At that time, he had stopped playing in public. He was trying, towards the very end, the very, very last weeks of his life, he was trying to go back to the keyboard and was even planning to play some concerts. But, during those three years, there was not one note played (except on occasion on that Clavinova). Not one note. And he was desperate about it. It’s a very sad ending. This mighty artist and great, great mind, affected by all these problems.

Both my parents, at least two of my grandparents, and all three of my brothers were born with absolute pitch. Even within the term "absolute pitch" there is a continuum. My father has it to a lesser degree than my brother Marshall, who had a pair of ears that might have compared to Richter's, but Marshall didn't live long enough to experience physical changes in his hearing. To the rest of the family perfect pitch was just a given utilitarian thing. I grew up feeling like I was missing something. In most families the person with absolute pitch is the "other." In my family of origin I was "other." And if I sang something in the wrong key, my brothers would always let me know.

"You're in the wrong key!"

Pitches and harmonies are magical to me. They always were. But like most magical things they are also illusive. Sometimes a piece of music running through my head is in the right key, but I just don't have the wherewithal to name the key or the particular pitches. I sometimes recognize pitches by their color when they are played on a particular instrument, and my string-playing arm will usually find them when prompted by visual (i.e. reading music) stimulation. But my navigation through the world of pitches is like the visual experience of walking through a seasonally changing stretch of woods, following a well-worn path, and looking up, down, and all around to find wonderful happenings. Some people who walk through the woods see (and name) species of trees, species of flowers, species of birds, species of insects, species of mold, numbers of living trees, numbers of dead trees, geologic formations, erosion, and diseases of all sorts. Their visual experience is different from mine.

In his later seventies, my father, who will be eighty-nine in August, noticed that he started hearing pitches half a tone sharp. Since he is a string player, and has the musical habits of someone with relative pitch, he has managed to adjust. My friend Susan Teicher told me that her father, the pianist Louis Teicher also had that problem. And when I learned about Richter's half-tone-off hearing, I started to wonder if this kind of change in hearing might be a general physical phenomenon, but one only noticed by the small segment of the population who are musicians with absolute pitch.

Musicianship is so much more than pitch memory or pitch labeling. And there are zillions of sounds in the world that are not classified as music: language, animal sounds, nature sounds, motors, anything that vibrates, anything that bangs or rubs against objects. There are certainly people with absolute pitch who are not musical. They just use their sense of pitch in other ways.

We do know that size and shape of our ears change as we get older. This video from the BBC shows how the outsides of our ears change over time. I imagine that the insides of our ears change as well. And I imagine that changes in the inner parts of our ears affect the way we hear pitches. I asked an audiologist about this when it was happening to my father, and he could not give me any information.

After reading the article about Richter last night, I did a little google search and came upon this livejournal discussion, which links to a 2007 article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about aging and absolute pitch that confirms my suspicions.

Schubert Trout Quintet from November 8, 1976 NEC Faculty Chamber Music Concert

[Featuring my favorite violist!]











Thanks to my friend Dan Barrett for this!

Vote!

[drawn by Ben Leddy]

Marshall Fine's "Missouriana"

In honor and in memory of my brother, Marshall Fine, I'm posting his Missouriana, a delightful short piece for orchestra that he wrote in 1985. Here is what he wrote about piece:

Missouriana, op. 44, is based on Missouri folk themes and fiddle tunes, developed in my style without ever sacrificing the hoedown premise--not even in the fully worked-out fugue in the middle. I wrote it in 1985 for Hugo Vianello, who premiered it the next year, repeated it in the fateful year of 1989, and revived it again in 1994. Yet it is Alan Balter’s interpretation, done in 1989 with the MSO, that I find the best. It is also the first orchestral work that I committed to Sibelius notation; and Carl Fischer, who had published the manuscript original on a rental basis, was overjoyed when I submitted the printed score and parts to them in the spring of 2013.

Here is a link to a recording that could be from either the 1989 Memphis Symphony concert with Alan Balter conducting or the 1994 performance.

The score is available to look at at the Theodore Presser website. I have written to the company to ask them to make it available to be purchased or rented (they don't seem to have a way to do that through the page they have for the piece). I hope that they make the necessary adjustments so that the piece can have more performances.

Marshall Fine's Tango in Time of War, Opus 100

A conductor just sent an email message asking to hear a recording of my brother Marshall's "Tango in Time of War," so I loaded the recording that I have of the first performance (2003) into into Dropbox (it is too big a file to load into the IMSLP), and thought it would be nice to share here. The score and parts are on this page of the IMSLP.

UPDATE: Here are Marshall's program notes for "Tango in a Time of War."

TANGO IN TIME OF WAR, op. 100
With this work Fine accomplished two important goals: he sublimated his anger over America’s war policies, and he completed his reconstruction and elaboration of his early song The End. That this was done in the form of a tango is also significant; Fine admitted in his program notes for its premiere that the style, being one of the most polyphonic of dance forms, “should have commended itself to my attention long ago”. (And Fine’s appreciation of tango polyphony is fulfilled in the fugal recapitulation.)

The Tango in Time of War is actually the first-fruits of Fine’s discovery of tango writing, which Fine would continue in the next two works (Milagro del Amor and Milonga Para Salina) and would also have used for the finale of the mature Viola Concerto had he completed it. Elements of the tango are also present in the dirge-like coda for the slow movement of his sketched-out Fourth Symphony. Fine’s acquaintance with the tango style can be accurately dated to the summer of 2001, when Penn’s Woods’s new Music Director Gerardo Edelstein did an all-tango program was played which included the Piazzolla Bandoneon Concerto. The bandoneon soloist, Raul Jaurena, praised Fine’s ability to play in the style de-spite his lack of acquaintance with it (his fluency in it was only indirectly derived from his youth as a rock musician).

Subsequently one of his friends at the festival, the flutist Diane Gold Toulson, asked Fine to write a tango for her (the result was the Milagro del Amor, his second tango). At first he considered writing for mixed sextet (Gold Toulson, her husband and Penn’s Woods clarinet colleague Smith Toulson, a string trio to include Fine and his friend Melinda Daetsch, and piano), and after a difficult period absorbing the elements of Piazzolla’s nuevo tango (and its intensified anger and passion) completed this version in March 2002. But he retained this version, and started over with the Milagro.

Meanwhile, Fine had submitted the torso of the original in mid-March to Michael Stern, his conductor in IRIS, in hopes of being able to orchestrate it for performance by them. Stern accepted the work even in its incomplete form, whereupon Fine completed the orchestration in three weeks in May. (This also explains why Fine retained the original sextet version, for in doing so Fine revised some of his row-forms to better harmonize with his tango material, and apparently never had a chance to incorporate these revisions into the sextet version.)

Equally as important as the assimilation of tango style is the welter of influences from Fine’s youth and even early childhood, integrated here as a peculiar variety of therapy. The connection of the Tango in Time of War with The End is so intimate that the song’s tone-row incessantly finds its way into the tango, generally in the bridges between themes. The cello and viola solos have a curious derivation, which is explained in Unresolved Dissonance as Fine’s own scream of terror while running from a bee, imitated by his father. In addition Fine includes in the tango (twice) an in-joke among violists: he harmonizes five bars from the Hindemith op. 25 #1, counterpointing it with his tango themes as well.

The premiere took place in Germantown on January 25, 2003, and was a tumultuous success--Fine’s next-to-last before the mysterious catastrophes that befell him thereafter. Yet up to the premiere Fine had misgivings about the work. After completing it he wrote Paul Pellay that “it does not seem like a dance. It is more like a concert movement, somewhat like the Capriccio from the Second Viola Sonata, which depends on tango rhythms for its get up and go, and sounds angry besides under the influence of 9/11.” The premiere resolved all his doubts about the work, which has since been regarded--among those that had so far been performed, to be fair--as Fine’s best. Moreover, it led directly to IRIS’s commissioning of A Flower of the Infinite Garden in 2004.

Looking at My Mother's Art This Mother's Day

I'm remembering my mother this Mother's Day by looking at and sharing her art. This painting from 1988 is of our daughter Rachel playing in the sand in Chicago's Bixler Playlot. The Bixler Playlot, a hot-spot for tots on 57th Street, is in the same general neighborhood where my mother grew up.



You can see more of her work here and here.

The Tipping Point: A bit about my learning curve with the bow

I never realized how many puns and clichés could be used in a post title about bowing! What will follow is fascinating to me, but will probably not be fascinating to anyone who doesn't draw his or her bow across a set of strings for pleasure or for profit, so I will not be offended if you look elsewhere for something to read.

Twenty-five years ago I began my second life as a string player, and my father gave me some serious advice. I remember when and where he said it: in the west pavilion in Morton Park, in my town of Charleston, Illinois. He told me never to play with flat hair. I didn't understand what he was talking about. He explained that playing with flat hair kills the overtones in the sound. I took him seriously (as I always have), and spent the next twenty-five years playing on the outer edge of the bow's hair, making sure not to kill any overtones.

This past January I was practicing my viola transcription of the Ravel Sonata. I was frustrated at the bumpiness of the phrases. I switched to my lighter bow, and I realized I had been using too much bow pressure and not enough bow speed. For some reason, while I was increasing speed and reducing pressure, I decided to try flattening the hair of my bow as I approached the tip. Suddenly I had control of the whole length of the bow, and the phrases lost their bumpiness. The "when" of the flattening became a tool, and the "where" became a fluid solution to make phrases go where I wanted them to go.

What goes down (as in a down-bow) must come up, so the act of moving toward the outer edge of the hair as I made my way through the middle of the bow was another adventure in possibilities.

I showed this discovery to my students, and they were all completely amazed at the results. I imagine that there are geometric equations concerning the hypotenuse that is created when you move diagonally across the ribbon of bow hair that confirm that the bow becomes effectively longer when you play this way. But the upshot of the story is that the extremes of the bow are now each treasured destinations rather than being the "end of the line."

I told my father about my discovery, and he knew all about it. He asked me whether I used my arm or wrist to make the motion (both work).

Glimmers of Hope

It must have been fifteen years ago that our daughter went on a school trip to hear the Chicago Symphony. She was very excited that the program included a piece by Melinda Wagner, who, to her young and impressionable mind was like her mom: a composer who was a woman. Rachel listened carefully and took notes on the whole program (her mother was also a music critic at the time). She was a critical listener, with a distinct bias towards her mother's music, and she loved the Wagner. It was her favorite piece on the program.

The Chicago Symphony continues to commission music from Melinda Wagner, and the Chicago Symphony continues to perform music by Melinda Wagner.

Be like the Chicago Symphony.

Yesterday The New York Times published Michaela Baranello's encouraging piece about Florence Price. The University of Arkansas library has a whole archive of her unperformed work. Perhaps it is time for the big American orchestras to lead the way and do what the title of the Times article says about welcoming Price into the canon. The Times can do its part, but it is ultimately up to the people who make programming choices for the major orchestras. They could share some of the musical wealth that Florence Price left us, and "lesser" orchestras might follow suit. The handful of pieces I know are terrific. I would certainly like to hear more.

Douglas Shadle discusses the problem eloquently, and offers some sensible solutions.

To people who write about music: be like Michaela Baranello and Douglas Shadle

Measure of a Musician: Family Matters

I have always found that people respond differently to people who have, for whatever reason, achieved "status" in (or preferably outside of) the musical community. I grew up as a person perceived to be of "status" because of my father's position in the Boston Symphony. That status (my father did not intervene) got me into a youth orchestra that I had no business being in. I believe that status got me into Juilliard (again, my father did not intervene) because my teacher was impressed by my parentage. My sense of musical self worth was really screwed up, so I actually longed to be judged for what I could do. I actually envied people who got their positions in musical life without having grown up in a known musical family.

While I was at Juilliard there were four students who were daughters of principal violists of major orchestras: Two daughters of Sol Greitzer (Debby and Jody, a bassoonist and a flutist), the principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, and the daughter of Abe Skernick (Linda, who was a harpsichordist), the principal violist of the Cleveland Orchestra. I thought it would be fun to form an ensemble.

At lunch time in the Juilliard cafeteria, my teacher would always introduce he to his friends as my father's daughter. They all respected my father, even if they didn't know him. I met some interesting people, and had some wonderful conversations. I became friends with Paul Doktor who talked with me about his famous father.

After my last year of Juilliard I was accepted at two summer festivals: Tanglewood, and the American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. I chose to go to Graz partially because I felt that in Europe I could test the waters and see if I really had what it would take to be a musician as an anonymous person. I will never know whether I was accepted at Tanglewood because of my family status or from my playing. From my European (and Asian) experience I learned that there is no such thing as anonymity in the international community of musicians. My family status followed me like a loyal dog, and it wagged its tail even when I wasn't paying attention.

When I moved to Illinois, my family status followed me. I had instant acceptance and respect from my new community because of it. So I made the most of it, and arranged for my father to come to Illinois and play concerts with me, first when I was a flutist, and later when I became a violist. It was great to introduce him to my friends and colleagues, not to mention the people who liked to go to concerts. Dinners were held in his honor. People came to the concerts.

My father is now retired from the Boston Symphony, and he gets a kick out of it when concert-goers from the neighborhood recognize him when he is in line at the pharmacy. He is enjoying his well-earned status as musical elder statesman, and I enjoy the fact that he is enjoying it.

Partially because of the natural generational shifts that have happened in the musical community, my father's name is no longer a (musical) household one. And I have had many affirmations that the work that I do, both as a violist and as a composer, is acceptable on its own terms.

My Brother, My Self

I have been contemplating the "why" of composition lately. After years and years of addressing the "why not?" of composing music, I find myself at an interesting point of pause. And today, after a rather busy few months spent in navigating the hows, whys, and wherefores of music written by other people (with a lot of emphasis on the hows lately), I realize that almost every piece I have written has been a "working out" of something.

I suppose that I have always thought of pieces of music as a way to work through thoughts and work out ideas. Sometimes those thoughts are veiled representations of people, places, stories, and characters. Sometimes those thoughts involve interaction between abstract ideas using instrumental voices. Sometimes those thoughts involve the behavior of characters in history or fiction that do their interacting without words, and sometimes those characters work out their "stuff" with the help of a text.

I used to think that everybody who wrote music did this, but now I am beginning to think that doing this might be a family trait.

My brother, Marshall Fine, wrote program notes for his music. In those program notes he gives explicit details of how he wove the contradictions and concerns in his personal and professional life into the music he wrote. His Rock Etudes for Solo Viola, for example, concern specific events in his life that he connected with particular rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s. (You can read the notes in the IMSLP listing.) I believe that he used a logical organization of things musical to try to work out personal frustrations and experiences in his life that he could name but could not understand.

Every person on the autism spectrum has a unique set of challenges that make interpreting the workings of the world difficult, but because of Marshall's particular make-up, his particular "off-the-charts" set of musical gifts, his outspoken nature, and the relatively small size of his communities (the community of violists, the community of classical musicians in Memphis and Branson), he loomed large.

He certainly always loomed large in my world (and still does). Understanding something of this brother-sister bond through our shared attitude toward creative work gives me strength. My perception of the world is (as far as I can tell) that of a "neuro-typical" person, but the musical "working out" of interactions and ideas is nevertheless the reason that I like to write music.

The Italian violist Daniele Colombo's recording of Marshall's Rock Etudes will be coming out in the Solitudes label in the not-too-distant future. Daniele plays them spectacularly.

Notes on Reflections

I have spent the last couple of months working on a piece for flute and strings in memory of my mother, who died this past Valentine's Day. I finished the piece yesterday, and it is now in the IMSLP. I thought I would use this virtual "space" to write some notes about "Three Reflections for Flute and Strings."

The first movement has the title "Was will die einsame Thräne?" I began this as a setting of a Heine poem which I encountered, through a reference to it, in Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy, one of the books Michael and I read earlier this summer. The poem has been sitting next to me all summer, copied onto a yellow legal pad.

Was will die einsame Thräne?
Sie trübt mir ja den Blick.
Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten
In meinem Auge zurück.

Sie hatte viel leuchtende Schwestern,
Die alle zerflossen sind,
Mit meinen Qualen und Freuden,
Zerflossen in Nacht und Wind.

Wie Nebel sind auch zerflossen
Die blauen Sternelein,
Die mir jene Freuden und Qualen
Gelächelt ins Herz hinein.

Ach, meine Liebe selber
Zerfloß wie eitel Hauch!
Du alte, einsame Träne,
Zerfließe jettender auch!

The poem from the section called "Die Hedmkehr," XXVII from Heinrich Heine's Buch der Lieder, and it has been set by at least 81 composers. Here is a link to a good English translation.

I didn't do a full setting of the song, but I used the lines of poetry to write the major thematic material of the first piece of the set, and allowed the music to reflect poetry. The artwork on the Soundcloud link is by my mother.



The second piece in the set, "The Silence," is from a group of songs I wrote in 2002 to poems by Federico Garcìa Lorca. I made an arrangement of some of the songs for flute and piano, but left "El Silencio" out of that set. It works really well for flute and strings. Here's the poem:

Oye, hijo mío, el silencio.
Es un silencio ondulado,
un silencio,
donde resbalan valles y ecos
y que inclina las frentes
hacia el suelo.

Lee todo en: El silencio - Poemas de Federico García Lorca http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/el-silencio.htm#ixzz4HPZCoTfv

Here is the setting:



The third piece is a "Yahrzeit" tribute to my mother. I re-used and adapted material from a set of calendar preludes for piano that I wrote in memory of my brother Marshall for the Jewish year of 5775, the year that began right after his death. The time for my mother's Yahrzeit is in the month of Adar, so I used material from the piece I wrote for the month of Adar. Adar is the month of Purim, so the piano piece runs like a kind of story that is interrupted by explosions of noise (whenever the name "Haman" is spoken). For this setting I lightened the mood. I also reduced the number of "interruptions," and I turned them into trills. Here is the updated setting:



(For reference, and in case you are interested, here is a link to an audio file for "Adar.")

Beethoven Septet Boston Symphony Chamber Players

I heard my father perform this piece often, but this is the first time I have heard the recording (it was recorded in 1980 and released in 1982, while I was out of the country)! Thank you Pawel Rybkowski for uploading this!

Musical Family Fingerprints and Marginalia

Yesterday I went through a pile of music that my father gave to me. Most of it was viola d'amore music, but there was also music for a Concerto by Benda that I remember my father practicing when I was a teenager.

The Benda family was full of musicians and composers, and in 1968, the year the F-major Viola Concerto was published by Schott, the prevailing wisdom was that this Viola Concerto was by Georg Benda. The IMSLP doesn't have a listing for any of Georg's viola music (even under his Bohemian name of Jirí Antonin Benda), so, on a lark I looked at the pages for the other members of the Benda Family. It turns out that Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Benda (son of Georg's famous and prolific brother Franz who worked for Frederic the Great) was the Benda that wrote the viola concertos.

Ah, but the plot thickens.

I played through some excellent cadenzas that my father wrote for the F Major Concerto, and thought that it would be nice to share them on the IMSLP. I put them into Finale, and noticed that my brother Marshall had also written cadenzas for the same concerto. I also noticed that he essentially copied almost note-for-note the first nine measures of my father's cadenza for the first movement, and the first two measures of his cadenza for the second movement. After his "borrowings" from my father, he then jumps into the stratosphere of the viola's A string and proceeds to make his cadenza a technical tour de force. He must have used the same music I was using, because it was 1984 and Benda family scholarship of the time hadn't separated the music by Friedrich Wilhelm from that of his uncle Georg.

You can find both cadenzas on this page of the IMSLP.

On another note, there is a bit of marginalia inscribed on the first page of my father's music:

27 Salome
28 Rigoletto

I pondered this for a while, and then I remembered that in February of 1973, when I was 13, my father took me to New York to see an opera at the Met. I vividly remember my father telling me the story of Salome (which I found extremely creepy) and Rigoletto (which I also found creepy, but perhaps a little less creepy than Salome), and asking which opera I would like to see. I chose Rigoletto.

We took the train to New York, and it was so crowded that I remember standing up for some of the ride. I seem to remember the transporting of a cello involved in the trip to New York. I remember watching the opera, and I remember not understanding much about what was going on (it was in Italian and I was a teenager). I remember the bright blue dress that Guilda wore, and I remember the darkness of the set. I remember what I was wearing too.

We took the train back to Boston. When we arrived at the Route 128 Amtrak station late at night and in the snow, we found that someone had stolen the drive shaft from the car. A very nice lady with a Volkswagen Beetle packed us into her car and drove us home.

Proud to be Part of Ben's Musical Family

You can read the whole articlehere, on the Harvard Graduate School of Education website.