Deception in Deception

If you haven't seen the 1946 Warner Brother's movie Deception staring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains, you might find a way to see it before reading this post. You will certainly want to see it after reading this post. (It is unfortunately not on YouTube, but there are several trailers and teasers there.) I will try to avoid saying anything that gives away too much of the plot.

Deception is a movie primarily about music, but it is also about the fragility of love and ego. 

Because of the gentle and unreliable mixture of insecurity, need for connection, ego, the blurring of passionate personal love and passionate musical love, musicians (in real life and in movies) sometimes make choices that might not make sense to "lay people." 

In this case we have a successful and rich composer named Alexander Hollenius, his student (and kept mistress) Christine Radcliffe, and her refugee-from-Europe cellist boyfriend (from Christine's days in Vienna before the War) Karel Novak. Hollenius, being rich and influential, helped Karel leave Europe for New York without knowing that Christine had been in love with him. Christine doesn't want to let Karel know, because she believes that he is too emotionally fragile to take it.

(That's only one of the deceptions in the plot)

Another grand deception is the one where Paul Henreid, who plays the role of the cellist, appears to play the cello. This feat was accomplished by Henreid taking six months of lessons with Eleanor Aller's cello-teaching father, having a piece written by Eric Wolfgang Korngold for the movie with some passages where a non-cellist could be posed to play and look good (even if the sound wasn't good), and employing one right arm and one left arm of two hidden cellists occupying the sleeves of Paul Henreid's (probably over-sized) jacket to play the difficult close-up passagework.

Eleanor Aller played the concertos by "Hollenius" (really Korngold) and the uncredited Haydn for the movie's soundtrack. The cellists playing the cello held between Paul Henreid's legs didn't need to play in tune or make a decent sound because Aller was working her magic through the power of great musicianship and exquisite cello playing.  According to Aller's son (and my recently deceased friend) Fred Zlotkin, Gregor Piatagorsky was considered for the soundtrack, and when that proved not possible, Aller stepped in and did a remarkable job. Fred was also present during the recordings, albeit in utero.

Christine, identified in the movie's first exchanges of dialogue as a pianist and a composer, doesn't seem to have a means of support aside from what Hollenius has given her. As a leading woman in a 1946 film noir, she doesn't have many choices; the only actual power she has at her command (besides playing the piano very well in one scene) is the power to love, withhold love, deceive, or destroy.

My (no longer living) friend Seymour Barab once told me, while we were talking about the role of a composer, "First of all, they should be dead."

The ultimate bit of magic that dead composers can achieve is the way their personalities appear to be somehow present while their music is being played no matter who (or whom) it is doing the playing. They can also appear to be present when a recording is played by human beings that are no longer living. 

The composer's desire to connect with a person or people while writing a piece of music is generally fulfilled in the process of writing (with the object or subject usually not in the room). After the piece is written it then becomes a vehicle for a particular performing musician's self expression, and then a vehicle for any performing musician's self expression. In Deception Hollenius uses his concerto as an instrument of revenge against Christine and her husband.

The cellist Karel Novak declares that after the first performance of the Hollenius Concerto has been played the piece will be his ticket to a great career. Musicians need music to play, for whatever reason. As long as composers are willing and able to provide new music, and audiences have interest in hearing something they haven't heard before, musical culture moves forward, and occasionally careers are made. 

When all is said and done, we have to accept that the emotional substance that fuels a composition (friendship, love, jollity, seasonal zeal, revenge, religious devotion, experimentation, money, response to a text, or a response to a moving or still image) may never really be understood.

And ultimately it doesn't matter.

You can watch a remarkable BBC documentary about Korngold and the Slatkin family hosted by Aller's sons Leonard and Fred that includes a demonstration of the visual cello playing deception right here.

Composing as a Craft

During one of the many conversations I had with Seymour Barab over the years, he referred to his composing as his "craft." I was kind of startled at the time, but now I completely understand why he used that term, because so much of composing is craft. The act of composing is, in essence, taking (or making) materials, and assembling them in a pleasing way. Part of the craft of composing comes from removing the stuff that doesn't work, and reassembling the stuff that does work so that it can work better. It involves moving pitches around, expanding and contracting meter so that the music at hand is easy to read and easy to play or sing, once you get the pitches and rhythms learned. It involves manipulating textures (articulation) and dynamics, so that the musical lines you or I have drawn have a map to follow. It is important to keep the journey interesting. Like any journey it should have a clean start, interesting experiences along the way, time for reflection, motivation to continue, and it should come to a satisfying end.

I have been assembling material (arranging music) for half my life now, and only started working with my own material in the last twenty five years. I must have had a "backlog" of material rolling around in my unconscious from all of my playing and listening experiences, because melodic and thematic ideas kept bobbing to the surface demanding that I play with them. At that point composing felt like art, and I was kind of intoxicated with inspiration. My life with busy with school (I was studying composition), work (I had a graduate assistantship which involved a lot of grading, and had CD reviews to write), family (Michael and our two growing kids), practicing, quartet playing, and orchestra playing, but I got up very early in the morning and chain-wrote a lot of music.

People seemed to like what I wrote, but I can't say that people took my work very seriously. I guess I was writing lyrical music during a time when minimalism and/or avant-garde looping were the new-musical fare. Or maybe it was because I was a woman working in a field that was so dominated by men. Maybe it was because I lacked craft (you can never have enough craft), or maybe it was because I didn't (and still don't) live in a cosmopolitan place, or that I never went beyond a Master's Degree, and therefore, other than teaching at a community college, I am not part of the academic hierarchy.

Being an "outsider" does have its perks, though. I have had to make my own way, and seek out my own challenges. But most of all I have had time to develop my craft. Now, at the age of sixty-one, I feel like I can rely on my craft to do just about anything I want. Craft has been a nice companion during this Covid-19 isolation. It has allowed me to be able to work out feelings through the music I write, and I feel like I have a larger community of musicians who live in cosmopolitan places, but are also isolated.

So I have been writing music for musicians to play and sing at home. People do need new music to play, and I'm happy that my craft is sufficient to write music that people like to play and sing.

In my virtual world of Facebook and Twitter, I see that a lot of performing musicians have been writing their own music during this isolation. Some of them create their own publishing companies, and some sell their newly-written music through their websites, which, for the business-minded musician is the only way to make any money from writing music. I put almost all of my newly-written music in the IMSLP because it is an easy way to get music to people who need it (or want it) now. It provides a sense of instant gratification and a feeling of connection with other musicians, so it works for me.

I do have eighty pieces of music published by commercial publishers (some of it forthcoming), so anyone who wants to buy my published music can. My published music isn't my property, and I only get royalty checks every few years, because ASCAP doesn't issue checks that amount to less than $25.

I have written a lot of music these past few weeks, and feel almost like the reverse of the way I felt during my first bout of chain writing between 1999 and 2005. Now I am intoxicated by craft. Ideas come, and I can write them down in a coherent form fairly quickly, and it is in the craft of working with them that I get my jollies.

Many Moons

I was so excited to find this beautiful performance of my setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Moon" yesterday on YouTube, so I'm sharing it in the company of other musical settings of the poem, just because I can.



This one written by my friend Seymour Barab was recorded in 1953 by Russell Oberlin.

Here is one written and sung by Linda Trillhaase:

and one written by Margarita Zelenaia:



Here's a two-voice setting by Glenda E. Franklin: and a rather "poppy" (but attractive) one by Igor Loseev:



I found some more pop settings, but they are all preceded with ads, so I will spare you the "ad-gony" (my newly-coined word for the feeling that happens when you anticipate hearing a particular piece of music on a YouTube link and get an ad instead). While searching through the videos on YouTube I came across this lovely setting of eight poems from A Child's Garden of Verses written and sung by Jason Mulligan. He doesn't have a setting of "The Moon" in this volume, but he might have it in a forthcoming volume.

Seymour Barab's Shadow

I love this setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's "My Shadow" by Seymour Barab. I got a 2010 CD reissue of the whole cycle, but aside from the composer and the countertenor, there is no indication of who else is playing. I am getting old enough to have mortality-related regrets. If Seymour were still alive (he would be turning 100 in January), I could call him on the phone and ask him. But I didn't know about his setting of these poems from A Child's Garden of Verses until last week, and hadn't heard them until today.
You can find all the songs in the cycle here. It seems to be one of those entries put on YouTube as a "host" for ads, unfortunately.

"And this shall be for music . . ."

One of my favorite songs in all of twentieth-century music is Vaughan Williams's setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Roadside Fire" from his Songs of Travel. Here it is sung so beautifully by tenor Gervase Elwes in 1919.

I have always thought of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry to be inherently musical. And I know now that I am not alone! Here is listing of settings of his poems, which I know is not exhaustive, since I know of one setting that is not included. It was really exciting to see that Seymour Barab wrote a setting that was recorded by his friend Russel Oberlin:

Seymour Barab [b. 1921]. ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ for voice and piano. 2 vols. Boosey and Hawkes. Recorded in 1953 by Russell Oberlin on Counterpoint CPT 539 [LP] and in 2010 on remastered CD by Essential Media Group (ASIN: B0036VNVKG)

After spending so much time with A Child's Garden of Verses, and having been such good friends with Seymour Barab (oh why did we never talk about these?), I look forward to getting my hands on the score and my ears on a copy of the recording.
But I only recently learned that Robert Louis Stevenson was an amateur musician and composer himself!

This study by J.F.M. Russell lists Robert Louis Stevenson's musical activities and projects in historical order. It is enhanced with audio links and images. I'm planning to spend a bunch of time going through them, and I'm sharing them here so that other Robert Louis Stevenson "fans" can go through them too.

Seymour Barab was born 99 years ago today.

January 9th always means Seymour Barab's birthday to me.

The Snow Queen and Other Plans

Like most people who enter graduate school, I had a lot of energy, many resources, and high hopes for success. I decided to write an opera based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen as a thesis project, and I finished the opera, my thesis, and my degree in 2002.

Plans were underway in the university to build a theater as part of a renovation, and the chair of the music department had plans to mount a production of my opera when the renovation was finished--as a way of opening the theater. Thanks to budget impasses in the state, the renovation was delayed. Then the chair of the music department left the university for a position elsewhere. All plans to perform my opera were simply forgotten.

While things were looking positive for a performance, my son Ben and I designed some nifty snow globes to give to people who would have been involved in the production. A box of Snow Queen snow globes is sitting in the garage, and one snow globe is still sitting on my desk. Here's a photo:



And here's a clearer image of the rune that Ben and I designed to go inside:



Fortunately Raoul Ronson of Seesaw Music was interested in publishing the opera. I made friends with Seymour Barab over the piece (we exchanged scores of operas based on the same story to see how the other person handled the malevolence of the Snow Queen's character). My opera won an honor from an organization in Vienna. When Raoul Ronson died, The Snow Queen went to Subito along with the other Seesaw material. But nobody seems to know about it. I think the piece (and the thesis) has some merit.

The entry for The Snow Queen in my thematic catalog blog that has links a couple of recordings of excerpts from the opera.

So, I'm just leaving this post about the opera here for someone to find one of these days. The orchestral score and parts are available for rental from Subito Music. There are piano/vocal scores in a few university libraries. Here's the Subito link to the piano/vocal score.

Unfairness, Competition, and Self-doubt

I really enjoy reading the posts that young musicians put on Reddit. It almost makes up for the lost art of commenting in the blogosphere. The anonymous nature of the posts and replies makes it very different from the other social media forums I know where people discuss musical matters.

Musicians usually do not go onto Reddit looking for praise for the things that they are doing in their musical lives (like they do on Facebook), but many are looking for affirmation of their abilities. Many are young people looking for some kind of support from people outside of their regular musical lives (people other than their peers and teachers). High school can be a competitive musical place. So can college. People are often evaluated unfairly, and everyone is worried about having some kind of future in music, particularly if music is their major.

I remember the unfairness. I remember the competition. I remember the sense of self doubt that permeates during early adulthood and festers throughout later adulthood.

I can't do anything in my adult life about unfairness except to do my best to be fair. And I actually think that competition among students can be a positive thing, so I don't discourage it. Nobody was better, smarter, more fearless, or more imaginative, in my experience, than the musicians I grew up with. I imagine that for most adults nobody looms as large as their contempoary childhood heroes.

When I was young I thought I was the only person who lived with a high degree of self doubt. Everyone at Juilliard seemed confident about how good they were. They talked about it all the time, and they demonstrated it in the way they played. The people who had teachers who berated them rose to the occasion and used the experience as a way to become stronger. I kind of envied those people, because my teacher, Julius Baker, never berated anyone. He also never told me what I needed to do in order to improve. He always said that I needed to find my own way.

When I told my friend Seymour Barab this, he said that he never knew that Julius Baker was such a good teacher. I could not agree. I believe that the job of a teacher of conservatory students is to teach students how to be better at playing their instruments and to help them grow as musicians.

At one point I was considering leaving Juilliard. My friends at Juilliard who had been to regular college seemed so much happier and smarter than I was at the time. My father, having seen my SAT scores, advised me to continue at Juilliard.

One day I asked my teacher if he thought I had any talent. I asked him because he always talked about how talented the other students were, but never seemed to care about what I was doing. The only way I could learn from him was to study the way he played, and try to intuit his thoughts when he taught other students during the lesson time that I thought was meant for me. I had to clear the afternoon to get a lesson, and I spent most of those afternoons listening to other students play.

My teacher's response to my question was, and I can quote, "You will say that Julius Baker gave you the best advice of your life. Go see a psychiatrist."

I took his advice immediately. I hauled myself down to the school's office, and I got a referral to a psychiatrist, one Dr. Richard Kopff (!!!) who saw Juilliard students. I had to have a diagnosis made up so that my father's insurance would cover it, so I was treated under the generic label "anxiety nervosa."

My sessions consisted of me coming in and talking about my teacher not showing up for lessons. Dr. Kopff did ask me about family things occasionally, and, since I was a young person, there was a certain amount of drama in my life to talk about. But I was pretty sure that Dr. Kopff assumed the reason my teacher didn't show up at lessons or teach me was because I didn't have any talent. I know this because I invited Dr. Kopff to come to a recital I played, after which the whole direction of our therapy changed.

I suppose the experience taught me that I did indeed have business staying in music, I didn't need a psychiatrist, and that my teacher's lack of interest in teaching me had nothing to do with my talent or lack of talent. Fortunately, during the course of my therapy (but not as a result of it) I found two friend-teachers (a flutist and a cellist) who were more than willing to make up for my teacher's inadequacy (out of the kindness of their hearts--no money was ever involved).

I believe both of them were "paying forward" musical kindnesses. I know I was extremely fortunate, and I continue to express my gratitude for what they did for me by doing what I can to help other musicians.

I actually have found my own way, but, thanks to Julius Baker, it is as a composer and as a string player who keeps a blog rather than as a flutist. I have found my own way the hard way. I am much happier now than I could ever have imagined being when I was a young adult, but it came as a result of building up my musical life from scratch ten years after graduating from Juilliard.

I did stay in touch with Julius Baker after leaving Juilliard, and I sent a tape of my violin playing to him a year or two after I started playing. He called me up to ask me why I was playing the violin. I explained why, and he said, "But you were such a good flutist." Too little too late, I say.

Hannukah Latkes

Back in 2009 I shared this song with my friend Seymour Barab, and he told me that it should be on the "hit parade." I laughed. And he said that he was serious.

I always wanted to write a Christmas song, but my heart has never been in it. Hannukah, however, is a different story.


December 11, 2009

The music is available here.

Margie King Barab (1932 - 2018)

Our dear friend Margie King Barab died peacefully in her home on Park Avenue in New York on January 3. Her 85 years of life began in Nebraska. Her singing voice took her to the Manhattan School of Music. She answered an announcement from someone looking for a room mate, and her "proxy landlord" (he was house-sitting) was the brilliant 50-year-old Alexander King. After a while, she fell in love with him. When she married Alex, Margie was not aware that he had an opium addiction. She helped him recover and served as his muse. Later in her life Margie wrote a book about him, and she told me a few years ago that it is being considered for publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

After Alex died, Margie married the great composer Seymour Barab, who was the kindest man in the world. You can read all the posts I have written about Seymour and Margie here.

I miss both Seymour and Margie so much. They were our true friends, and they were true friends to many other fortunate people. The world is considerably poorer now, but our memories of Margie and Seymour stay (together) in our hearts, and they continue to inspire us and give us comfort.

Operas written since 1945: an impressive list

Vagne Thierry has created an impressive (and extensive) list of operas written since 1945. He includes the names of composers (with dates and nationalities), titles of their works, and links to their websites and to media (CDs and DVDs).

Just glancing through I learned that Beth Anderson wrote an opera about Queen Christina of Sweden (so now I don't have to), Giancarlo Aquilanti wrote an opera about Lot's women (so now I don't have to), and Hubert Bird wrote an opera about John Dee, the Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I (so now I don't have to).

I see friends on the list: Gary Bachlund's fable operas are on the list, and a good number of Seymour Barab's operas are there (with links).

Mr. Thierry kindly sent me an email message letting me know about the list (my operas The Snow Queen, Sister Beatrice, and EMMA are listed). I imagine he sent messages to all the living composers on the list with an email address, and that other composers are looking through the list and enjoying it as much as I am. I could spend all day with this (it took an hour just to make it through from A to C), but I will have to wait until later to dip in again. There's a lot to be learned from this list.

Writing an opera is a HUGE amount of work, and is, in my case, a labor of love. That love is so often unrequited because works by "unknown" composers are so rarely produced these days. I would venture to guess that most of the operas on this list have had few performances, and that many have never been produced.

Thierry is doing a great service for the musical community. I'm hoping opera-minded people (i.e. people who like to produce and perform operas) might find material for future productions here.

Early Autumn Ramble

I suppose that autumn is a collecting time. And this autumn, while I'm waiting for a magnificent event (the upcoming birth of our first grandchild), I have been busy collecting my thoughts.

Mine is a rather consistent musical life, so I find it stimulating when I find myself among young (and not-so-young) ambitious and optimistic musicians who hope to make a mark on the world. I suppose that at age 58 I should be one of the people who has already made her mark, but as a person who started her string-playing life rather late (in my early 30s), I sometimes still feel like I am finding my way around the fingerboard. I sometimes bite off just a little more than I can technically chew, but I feel fortunate never to feel like I am "stuck" at a high technical level, as I was with the flute, with no way to grow musically and nowhere to go.

At this point in my life I am happy to be included in the dance, and I am happy to be able to play with young people who don't seem to have any trouble getting around their instruments at lightning speed. I can play in tune, make the kind of sound I want to make, and more often than not I like what I hear when I put notes together in phrases.

I am relieved that I have not become that kind of an older colleague who exudes a sense of authority and superiority. When I am physically too old to play, I would like my legacy to be that of a good section player and a welcoming colleague who does not judge younger colleagues, except to compliment them when a compliment is in order.

I also never want to project an air of superiority over musicians who play the music I write. As youngsters we are taught to think of the composer of a given work as an authority figure, and we dutifully follow the "rules" that are set out for us. Too often we think of "the composer" as a judge. I would rather be thought of like a tailor who offers attractive practical clothes that fit well, wear well, and are comfortable in all kinds of weather.

The more music I write, the more music of other composers that I arrange, and the more music I play, the more I understand that composers and players are collaborators, even if the composer is not in the room, or is no longer alive.

Dynamics are the essence of musical relativity. My friend Seymour Barab once said that he wished he could just write piano and forte and be done with it. Composers often indicate tempo markings that are too fast (I know I do). Nobody performs with a metronome, so we find our own tempos and allow the composer's indications to act as guidelines. Sometimes slurs, like rules, need to be broken. We all break them from time to time, and for all kinds of reasons.

The idea of success in musical life seems to go hand in hand with ambition and recognition. In order for music to be played, people have to know about it. There are composers who devote vast amounts of time towards promoting their work themselves, and there are composers who devote serious financial resources towards having other people promote their work. Making a living purely from composing commissioned music and having various residencies at festivals and with orchestras seems to be a goal for some composers. It seems to be a measure of success not to have to have a "day job," even if that "day job" is one connected with music. And then there's the pie-in-the-sky idea of being a household name.

(I have to put in a joke from Seymour Barab. He told me, jokingly, that he once thought of changing his name, and he had the perfect one picked out: Leonard Bernstein.)

I used to feel ashamed about not having the skills or the drive to promote my work so that I too can "compete" in the "marketplace," but I no longer feel ashamed about it. Even in my relative obscurity I have come to understand that it is mostly a waste of my time and energy. Thanks to this blog and my Thematic Catalog blog (see I can do a bit of informational self promotion), I make my work available to people who are interested. I also share work for string quartet and string orchestra that is not published and cannot be put in the IMSLP (i.e. arrangements of pieces that are not in the public domain) with people who want to play it (just send me an email message). That's enough for me.

Given the past 500 or so years of published music, there is a lot of music to play. There is also a lot of new music to play, and there are many more composers writing now than there were before computer technology made the physical nuts and bolts of the composition process easier. I think that it is a good thing, because I think that the act of writing music does a lot to help people grow as musicians. It helps musicians to understand what to value in music by great composers from the past like Joaquin, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, and sometimes contemporary composers get lucky and write something of real value.

There is a lot of music that we may play but do not necessarily perform. Consider the Bach Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas. String players devote much of their lives to them, but only a relative handful of string players perform them. We still get a great deal of pleasure out of working on them. The idea of people getting together to play chamber music, and getting pleasure from interacting with one another musically while playing something that I have written is truly the best response I could ever hope for from my (still growing) body of work.

Count Emilio Guidoboni-Visconti

In his book about Balzac, Stefan Zweig introduces a most interesting musical character from history: Count Emilio Guidoboni-Visconti. The count was the husband of one of Balzac's lovers, and, according to Zweig, was a passionate violinist.

His real love was for music, and he was a character worthy of being immortalized in a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he was a descendant of the great condottieri, his greatest pleasure was to sit in a theater orchestra among the professional musicians and play the violin. At Versailles, where he had a house in the Avenue de Neuilly in addition to his palaces in Paris and Vienna, he would slink out every evening and take his place in the orchestra pit, and wherever he went he humbly requested the favor of being allowed to scrape away at the local theater. In the daytime he amused himself by playing at being a chemist. He would mix all sorts of ingredients, pour the result into bottles, and attach neat labels. Society bored him. He liked to keep in the background, so he was no bother at all to his wife's lovers. He was affable to every one of them, since they enabled him to devote his energies all the more uninterruptedly to his beloved music.

There is little to be found about this violin-playing count, but he does appear very briefly in Isabelle Aboulker's 1999 opera Monsieur de Balzac fait son theatre. He has one spoken line in the first act, and never returns again.

But Zweig, Balzac, and the Count have just led me to the music of Isabelle Aboulker, and I can, in turn, lead you there too. Aboulker's musical sense of humor reminds me a great deal of Seymour Barab's sense of musical humor.



Here's a whole recital of her songs set to text by Jean de la Fontaine, Jules Renard, Hans Christian Andersen (!!!!), Marie Curie, and Charles Cros, performed by soprano Elsa Tirel and pianist Eleonore Sandron.

What an excellent composer!

Bernard Zaslav: A Special Violist in My Life

Bernard Zaslav, who was born in 1926, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 90. He holds a very special and a very permanent place in my heart. I got to know Bernie extremely well, first through his recordings, then through the internet viola list, and later while working with him on his memoir, The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody.

Shortly after I began working with Bernie on his book I began to wonder if he might know my friend Seymour Barab, who was active in New York at the same time. I casually asked Seymour if he knew Bernie, and Seymour got very excited. He told me that they were in a string quartet together during the 1960s, and that they hadn't been in touch for 50 years (Bernie left New York for Milwaukee in 1968 to play with the Fine Arts Quartet, and Seymour remained in New York for the rest of his life). I gave each the other's phone number, and they renewed their friendship. Seymour read through a draft of Bernie's memoir and made many excellent suggestions. (Michael enjoyed Seymour's comments so much that he used to show pages of Seymour's editing to his college students.)

I have written a lot on this blog about Bernie. He was a remarkable man who, through his playing, his wit, and his kindness, brightened American musical life for much of the 20th century from sea to shining sea (peppered with many concert tours abroad).

You can find the posts I have written about him here, and you can get a copy of his memoir from Amazon, where he tells true tales about the marvelous musical world of the 20th century from the standpoint of one of its brilliant inner voices. The book comes with two CDs that give a musical overview of a remarkable career.

Seymour Barab's Complete Philip Marshall on Vimeo

Margie King Barab just let me know that a video of Philip Marshall, Seymour Barab's Civil War opera, is available to watch on line. This work would certainly be appropriate to revive during this Sesquicentennial observance of the end of the Civil War. Here's an excerpt from E. Thomas Glascow's review in Opera News of the first performance in 1974.

ON JULY 12 came the world premiere of Seymour Barab's Philip Marshall, a timeless, engrossing drama (libretto by the composer) about a Civil War veteran who, on returning home, finds life irrevocably altered by the conflict. Sandwiched between a spoken prologue and epilogue (Mrs. Hannon's visit to the doctor of the mentally crippled hero), the opera unfolds as flashback in the minds of Philip and Mrs. Hannon; a single, functional set served through the two long acts, with blackouts and prop changes behind one of the spotlit characters carrying on a sort of memory trip. The opera seemed tailor made for television.

Barab's lyrical, tastefully orchestrated score (with arias and ensembles) got sensitive treatment from the large orchestra under Wolfgang Schanzer. In the role of Maritha--the naive impetuous girl in love with Philip--Julia Lovett proved herself a singing actress of the highest caliber, with a soprano voice of exceptional purity and range. The other roles were well filled, from Theodor Uppman's sympathetic, war-weary hero to tenor David Griffith's war-dodging prodigal son, Jonathan Hannon. Soprano Suzanne Blum sang a passionate Rosellen (Philip's fiancé-turned-madam), and as Lucius, baritone Ronald Holgate developed from sinister bordello owner to heartsick, jealous lover...

Here's the first act:

Philip Marshall part one from Ronald Blumer on Vimeo.

. . . and here's the second act:

Philip Marshall act two from Ronald Blumer on Vimeo.

"Having written"

Before I started writing music, I had a talk with a composition student about writing music. He told me that he enjoyed having written music, but did not particularly enjoy writing it. Once I started writing music myself, I found the process itself far more interesting than the satisfaction of "having written." There are some pieces that I am happy to have written, many, in fact, but the real creativity and the real satisfaction comes in the putting of one note after and against another.

I suppose that we are all wired differently.

The big problem comes when you have written a lot of music, as I have, and have little motivation to engage in the process of self promotion, which has been elevated to the status of an art in itself. A person gifted in the art of promotion can make anything seem appealing, no matter how useful, beautiful, or worthwhile it actually is. But a person without the drive or the means to promote his or her music this way can feel the act of "having written" as something negligible.

In the years before the internet, composers had music festering in drawers and files. Now it can fester in plain sight on publisher's computer hard drives or in online libraries, amid hundreds of thousands of perfectly good pieces that other composers have written.

Mild success can give a person hope, but success always seems relative. Seymour Barab always felt let down when his efforts to promote his excellent work (and it remains excellent work) proved unsuccessful. The fact that his Little Red Riding Hood was performed constantly didn't mean much to him, but the fact that his more recent theater work could not get a run in an off-Broadway theater did. Fortunately during the very last year of his long life he got some of the acclaim he deserved. When we talked about this his reply was, "I wish it hadn't taken so long."

Seymour was always most interested in what he was working on at the moment. At the end of his life he was working on a set of songs that he wasn't able to finish. It was a set of songs about New York, and the last time I saw him he described the texts as being racy jokes. I remember when he ran out of the specially-sized music paper that he liked to use for songs, and how I found some PDF score paper that could be photocopied into a size that would work for him. He was very happy to be able to get back to work.

Now that Seymour Barab is no longer writing, we have the music that he has written. And there's a lot of it.

Remembering Seymour Barab

. . . as a young man, and through his life:



and as a string quartet player.

New York Times Obituary for Seymour Barab

Margalit Fox wrote a beautiful obituary for Seymour that is in today's New York Times.

You can read it here.

The Kindest Man in the World

One of the best things about going to graduate school as a composer is the number of musicians (people on the faculty as well as students) who are willing and able to play the music we write. I was rather worried that the end of graduate school would mean that most of the music I would write would sit in a drawer in my non-cosmopolitan town, but it happened that my friend Susan Teicher's mother (who happened to be named Elaine) was in town, and she suggested that I contact her friend Seymour Barab for advice about what to do about my work. She said she would tell him to expect a letter from me.

I knew one piece by Seymour Barab: a duet for viola and harp that my father used to play with his wife during the early 1980s. My half brother (who was a baby when they were working on the piece) used to say "Ba-ba" whenever they would practice the Barab.

I wrote Seymour a letter and I included a couple of scores and a few recordings. He called me a week later, and told me that he would talk with his publisher about looking at my work. We talked about all sorts of things, and it turned out that he and I both had written operas that were settings of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. We decided to exchange scores and recordings so that we could see what the other did with the story, and began a great phone friendship and many more score exchanges. Seymour invited me, Michael, and our kids to visit the next time we were in New York, and ever since that first visit, high points of our yearly trips to New York were the afternoons we spent with Seymour and his wife Margie having lunch at 3 Guys at 96th and Madison and hanging out at their apartment.


[Margie King Barab, Michael Leddy, and Seymour Barab looking at Labonfam abeber, a nonsense book by Jean Dubuffet filled with erotic drawings.]

Seymour and I continued to exchange scores and recordings, and he always went out of his way to try to get people he worked with interested in the music I wrote. Whenever anyone asked me to write something to play on a recital, I would suggest putting a piece by Seymour on the program too. Once I even got an oboe player (John Dee--a terrific oboe player) to commission a piece for oboe and string quartet from Seymour. It felt really good to reciprocate some of Seymour's kindness to me, but there was just so much to reciprocate. He wanted to hear recordings of every recital I played and every performance of something I wrote, and he would always call to talk about them.

Seymour's name came up while I was working with Bernie Zaslav on The Viola in My Life. Seymour and Bernie played together for many years in the Composers Quartet and hadn't been in touch since Bernie left New York in 1968. I got them back in touch with one another a few years ago, and Seymour read through a draft of Bernie's book and made many excellent comments (and corrections).

Seymour died on June 28th at the age of 93. The last time Michael and I saw Seymour was on Wednesday, May 21. We had lunch at 3 Guys. He brought me a couple of books: a memoir of Harold Coletta, and Nicholas Slonimsky's Perfect Pitch: A Life Story. I found a card inside the Slonimsky book written to Seymour from a person I do not know (it looks like the person is named "Don," but I can't be sure).

He or she writes,

"Happy Belated Birthday dear Seymour--
You are a national pleasure. Oops! I meant treasure."

On the inside of the book is written,

"Dear dear Seymour--
It is a joy and a privilege to know you--
Bless you!
Happy Birthday all year."

I couldn't agree more.

Seymour Barab January 9, 1921 - June 28, 2014

I'm too sad right now to write anything coherent, but please read the posts I have written about my dear friend Seymour over the years.