Van Loon's Lives

When I feel out of sorts I often go to my bookshelf and pick out a book that I might have bought when I felt out of sorts at some earlier time. The book I picked up yesterday was Van Loon's Lives by Hendrik Willem van Loon. I bought it at a used book store thinking that it was the book I tried to read in second grade (I wanted to read every book in the school library, and this was the biggest one of all) called The Story of Mankind by the same writer. When I realized I had the wrong book it went on my book shelf and sat there for a few years, until yesterday.

The book, written in 1942, is a series of scenarios involving dinner parties with various people from various times history. Some dinner party "groups" are made of people who lived at around the same time, and some groups are made of people who lived in entirely different times from one another. Van Loon introduces each guest to the reader, he and his wife have to decide what to serve, and we get to read about their dinner discussion. Here are some of the chapters that involve musicians:

Chapter IV: This Time Erasmus Had a Surprise for Us, and we Make the Acquaintance of the BACHS and the BREUGHELS

In the course of this chapter the host plays Bach a recording of his Toccata and Fugue as orchestrated by Stokowski, and Bach is not impressed. He thinks it sounds like something Vivaldi might have written before he learned to write. J.S. Bach is joined by his ancestors and his sons, and W.F. does a considerable amount of drinking. Of course the Bachs spent much of the evening playing music while the Breughels painted their portraits.

There is reference also to dinner guest from another evening, Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (I learned his full name from this book), who was impressed with Frits' (another member of the party-giving crew) typewriter. "If I had one of those contraptions," he said, playing with the keys, "I might have done a little writing."

Chapter XI: SAINT FRANCIS, H.C. ANDERSEN, and MOZART Come, But They Do Not Come Alone

Chapter XVII: And Now a Rather Strange Combination, EMILY DICKINSON and FREDERICK CHOPIN, But Emily Has the Time of Her Life, and Chopin Shows us What Can Be Done With a Minni-Piano

This book is sure to keep me "in sorts" for a long time.

My Experience with the Mozart Effect

When I was about 13 and beginning to learn algebra I used to listen to a recording of Mozart's 20th Symphony when I did my math homework. For some reason it seemed to help me, and while I was listening I actually seemed to understand what I was doing. Unfortunately nobody played Mozart's 20th Symphony when I was in math class or when we had tests, so I never really got good at math, but I did learn to love Mozart.

Technorati tag: classical music

Random Thoughts about Listening to Recordings

Because I work as a record reviewer, much of the listening I do could be thought of by some as work. When I listen to a recording that I am planning to review I need to pay attention to what I hear and figure out something to say about it that might be useful to someone who may or may not be interested in what I have to say. Those readers may or may not go out and buy that particular recording, and if any of them do, each person would certainly have a different experience listening to the recordings I write about. I hope that I'm doing some good.

My concern as a record reviewer is to try and hear what the people who participated in the making of a particular recording, including the composer of the music, put into it. This requires listening beyond the surface. It is very important to be honest. If what I write is true (and there are many truths when it comes to writing subjectively) then I am happy.

I rarely have any contact with any of the people who make the recordings I review, even when they are people I once knew, and it is equally rare that anyone makes any kind of comment about a review I have written. It is a kind of lonely way of communicating, but listening to recordings has become a rather solitary act thanks to portable stereos and ipods. Even listening to the radio is usually a solitary act. People tend to listen alone in their cars. Once in a while two people might be listening at the same time in a car, but I believe it is rare to have a really communal listening experience listening to classical music on the radio. There is certainly no communication with the person sitting in the radio station who decided to play that particular recording and press the button to have it play.

In a way listening to recordings is the opposite experience from being in the audience at a concert. A recording you can turn off if you are tired of it, but at a concert you would be disruptive or even insulting if you got up and left. If you happen to be listening to a recording with someone else, you can make comments out loud about the music (another concert no-no). If you want to listen to something again on a recording, it takes no more effort than pressing a button. In a concert you would have to wait unti the end of the piece and yell "encore!" Even then the performers would probably play a selection they prepared for their "encore," and would not repeat the exact movement or section of a movement you would have liked to have heard again. It would also surely be different from the performance you would have just heard, because no two performances of any piece are exactly the same, even when played by the same people in the same place, and for the same audience.

At a concert (one that is not being recorded) you can share a collective experience of a moment in time that happens only once and will never happen again.

Is it a trend or an exception?

Last night my husband Michael and I played for "open mic night" at a local coffee house. Michael is a jazz guitarist and plays like one, and I improvise on the violin like a composer. Still, we get along musically and have developed a respect for each other's style. Anyway, we played a couple of old "standard" songs last night and had a really good time playing. What impressed me most about the evening however, was the kind attentiveness of the audience. The performing area of the coffee house was packed with mostly college and high school students, and nobody talked during any of the performances (we stayed for two hours). It almost seemed to me that the people who were there last night (people in their later teens and twenties!) had a kind of need to participate in live performance either as a performer or as a listener. In this media-drenched age it fills me with hope.

Is this particular coffee house an isolated island of highly civilized behavior, or does this reflect a general trend?

Why do people go to concerts anyway?

Part of my musical life is spent going to concerts. I used to spend more time going to concerts when I lived in a city, but now that I live in a more rural area it seems that half of the concerts I attend are those I am playing in myself.

My major activity as a teenager (besides practicing) was going to concerts. I lived in Boston where there were always free concerts at the various universities and conservatories. I actually got to recognize members of the audience who seemed to "always be there." I suppose those people saw me as a person who was "always there" too, but one of the nice things about going to concerts in a city is that as part of the audience you can be among people, but you can also be with the music by yourself. There can be a tacit understanding between "regulars" that never needs to erupt into conversation. Sometimes those silent relationships are magical in themselves. It is, in a way, a luxury to be able to have the intimate contact that you have with the musicians playing and with the strangers sitting by you without having to say a word. For the time being there is a unique sense of community.

Playing concerts offers a similar experience. There are individuals in the audience, but when you are playing for them the line between each of the individuals seems to vanish. Everyone is experiencing the music. Some people are listening more intently than others (and I do believe that there is some kind of tacit communication between listeners, and those who listen with the most intensity somehow convey that sense of concentration to the other people in the audience) and some are only able to absorb what is on the surface. Still, it is the collective experience that makes concerts such special events. And as an instrumental musician I can communicate without having to use words.

Unfortunately when the music is over the experience is over.

One of the assignments I give to my music appreciation students is to go to a concert and write about it. I have 50 or so students, and only one of them has gone to a concert so far this semester. My hope is that my students will be sensitive to the delicate and rare sort of communication that happens during a concert of unamplified art music performed by people who have spent years learning how to play their instruments and months learning the music that they are playing on a particular concert.

I always hope that the concerts my students go to will be given in the spirit of universal music making. I always hope that the performers will maintain a sense of formality and offer their performance in the spirit of magic that I believe is ideal. Music is sacred and should be different from everything else. It is not simply entertainment. Entertainment can be found on television.

It is important to reach out to an audience with interesting programming. I always feel cheated with performing entities reach out to their audience with only music that is familiar. It is as if they think that their audience is not capable of listening to anything besides what they know. If performing entities do this for long enough, we will only hear the most familiar music on concert programs, and will have to turn to recordings to hear anything besides the warhorses of the repertoire.

The Musical Meme

I have been reading a fantastic book by Howard Bloom called The Lucifer Principle and have come upon his discussion of the meme. For some this is "old hat" (the idea was invented and named in 1976, but for me the musical implications of the idea are very exciting).

Here is a link to a discussion of the musical meme by Keith Otis Edwards that I found interesting.

Why do we tune to A=440?

I found this fascinating bit of information on page 205 of the March 1918 issue of The Etude under the heading "Musical Questions Answered."

Q. Why is there still some dispute about pitch? We all supposed that the matter was settled by the adoption of "International" pitch (A=435), but now we have a good deal about an A-440.

A. The pitch of A=435 was fixed in Paris for a temperature of about 60 degrees, but in America and also England it is customary to have the theatres and concert halls considerably warmer (say about 70 degrees), and wind instruments rise in pitch with a rise of temperature. The oboe is commonly used to give the pitch to a large orchestra, and the same oboe which would give A=435 at 60 degrees would give A=440 at 70 degrees, approximately. Theoretically the expansion of the material of a wind instrument when heated would lower the tone by increasing its size, but the effect is so slight as to be negligible, whereas the effect of a different temperature of the surrounding air is very plainly noticeable.

Here is some more pitch-related information.

The Rude, the Vulgar, and the Polite

From Peter Van der Merwe's Roots of the Classical: The Popular Origins of Western Music

This deep faith in 'natural law' is a bond between early Romanticism and neoclassicism. Just as the architecture of ancient Greece was felt to be more 'natural' than that of Rome because it was earlier and simpler, so the 'noble savage' was assumed to be the superior of a cultivated eighteenth-century gentleman; and so, too, simple folk melody was held to be a great improvement on Baroque polyphony. Of course, it was all self-deception. very few eighteenth-century gentlemen ever met a savage, noble or ignoble; ancient Greek architecture was far from simple; and the much-admired 'folk melody' was an urban idealization that had little in common with the rustic reality. The bogus has always played a vital part in Romanticism.

Roots of the Classical at Oxford University Press

Technorati Tags: Classical Music, Musicology

The BBC Beethoven Downloading Experiment

In loosewire there is a discussion concerning the BBC project to offer Beethoven Symphony performances for free download. Jeremy Wagstaff posed the following question:

But why is it that listening to free classical music is seen as a way of encouraging a broader interest in the genre (and, presumably, encouraging the listener to buy classical music) but when the music is pop, it’s seen as dangerous encroachment on the rights and prerogative of the music industry and has to be stamped out?

To which I responded:

The whole idea of music as "property" runs counter to the spirit of Beethoven. The whole idea of sharing a performance in this way seems completely in accord with the spirit of Beethoven. "Millionen" have already been "umschulgen" by this wonderful use of technology. When he wrote his music Beethoven expected to be paid for it once. He probably had the hope that his music would continue to live on after his death, but he and his contemporaries had no idea of "copyright" or "royalties" as we know it, and it is probably due to the lack of copyright and royalties that composers during the pre-copyright period (composers who are now firmly in the public domain) wrote so much music.

Nobody goes into playing or even writing classical music for the money. A handful of Conductors and a few big soloists are the only performing musicians who actually get rich playing music, and a smaller handful of composers (mostly film and theatre composers) are able to make a good living. Those of us who play music for a living can sometimes make enough to stay alive and, if we are really lucky, raise a family, own a car, and buy a house. And we can usually only do those things if we teach and/or have a spouse with a good job.

The musicians who played these BBC performances of Beethoven Symphonies were paid for playing them. They are not losing any money at all. They are also creating a whole lot of good will, and are hopeful that by extending this gesture someone might get curious and will come to another performance of a Beethoven Symphony. Every performance is different, you know. They have the same notes, the same rhythms, and the same expression markings, but the way the music comes out is different for every performance.

It seems that people tend to seek careers in pop music to become rich and famous and have fun at the same time. Those who do not become rich and famous are usually struggling, and all they have to show for the considerable effort they have put into their careers is their recorded music. If someone else were to "take" their music, tweak it, re-package it, and sell it as their own, that would be immoral and even illegal.

If you were to do that with Beethoven, everyone would know it. That is why Beethoven is safe to broadcast in this way.

Why Study Music?

Steven Coburn, who runs a piano studio on Brooklyn, gives some excellent reasons for learning to play an instrument.

Click here to get to his webpage and click on "Why Study Music."

He mentions that learning to play (in his case) the piano helps people to learn to deal with pressure, respond to criticism without taking things personally, learn persistence, increase their focus, and manage projects.

I can't think of a more fulfilling way to work on inner growth (especially for adults) than to do it by playing music. I think that Mr. Coburn's reasons for playing make sense for both adults and children because we are all in the process of growing.

There are a few differences between studying music as a child and studying music as an adult. When you are a child your parents usually pay for lessons (unless you are Leonard Bernstein), and when you are an adult you usually pay for them yourself. Parents also make (or find) time for their children to practice, while adults have to find their own. Other differences are minor.

No matter how you look at it, what you can achieve personally from the study of music at any time is of great and lasting value. Also, music lessons cost a fraction of what you might pay for other kinds of professional help.

Technorati Tag: Classical Music

Critic Forum

I found a very interesting forum about classical music on line in a very unlikely place where well known music critics Kyle Gann, Greg Sandow, Lloyd Schwartz, Anne Midgette, and Anthony Tomasini answer some very basic (and very important) questions about classical music.

Click here for the classical critics survey.

If you click here you will get to a class-by-class outline for Greg Sandow's course (taught in 1988 at Juilliard) concerning classical music in an age of pop.

Wilde thoughts about music

From The Critic as Artist by Oscar Wilde "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations."

Musical Uses for Index Cards

My family and I, along with thousands of people around the world, have gone index card crazy. For all the people who have followed the trail of index cards to this page, I can offer the way I use index cards for musical purposes.

I review CDs. Every other month I get a large stack to review for the American Record Guide. While I am listening for the first time, I jot down my thoughts about the recording on an index card. Then I slide the card into the CD case (it fits very well), and listen to the next CD in my stack. After I have listened to all the CDs, I refer to the notes on the index cards when I write my reviews.

Another way I use index cards is for teaching. Many of my students (and I assume all young students) need to be reminded of basic technical elements of playing all the time. When a student is working on a piece or an etude I use a paper clip to attach a brightly-colored (young students like bright colors) index card to the opposite page with guidelines written on it. When the student needs to be reminded of something technical I simply point at the item on the index card, making it unnecessary to make the student stop playing to make the technical adjustment. When the student has overcome the particular technical difficulties listed on the card, s/he can keep the index card for future reference. One student likes this method because she says the index card acts as a bookmark. I like this method because it leaves the printed music open for written directions that have more to do with music than technique.

Related Posts: More Musical Uses for Index Cards, Stand Hand.

From "Something to Say..." by Leonard Bernstein

In The Infinite Variety of Music, written in 1966, Leonard Bernstein discusses his method of writing music involving a kind of "trance state."

"All art recognizes the art the perceded it, or recognizes the presence of the art preceding it. So that it is not unlikely that your concept, the idea that will come to you in this trance, has something to do with music that has preceded it. And, in fact, even those composers who call themselves 'experimental' composers (and who are dedicated to the idea of writing music that is different from all other music that preceded it, making their music valuable only because it is different from earlier music) are admitting their recognition of the presence of art that preceded their own, because their art is still being written in terms of the art that preceded it--only this time in antithesis instead of imitation. Is that too confused? Yes. To put it another way, even experiemental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals, are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it. Therefore, in a sense they are composing in terms of the music that preceded them."

"But more important than this, the concept is conditioned by this crazy, compulsive urge to say something. We always hear a distinction made between good and bad creators on the ground that the good creator had something to say--'Something To Say' is the big, magic phrase--and the bad artist didn't have 'Something To Say.'"

Leonard Bernstein

Another Romantic Age of Music

It seems to be the law of art that when men are troubled in their souls they turn to such aesthetic diversions as will allow them to forget everything but their bodies. When their troubles are material and physical, they search for an art that will help them to escape from the body. We have passed through the first sort of trouble, and are into the second, which means that the days of Weber and Schumann and Wagner are about to dawn again. Another romantic age of music is not far off.

Deems Taylor Of Men and Music 1945