Interview with Oliver Knussen

I just came across this interview with Oliver Knussen that that comes from Paul Griffith’s book New sounds, new personalities: British composers of the 1980’s.

At What Price Competence?

Many years ago I came across a maxim in a method book for Oboe by Stevens Hewitt that reads as follows:

Competence is enough. Competence is all there is.

As a practicing and performing musician and as a composer my first goal is to be competent. Of course I would love to be more than competent, but I don't have a great deal of control over anything besides my daily work--moving one step at a time. Anything beyond mere competence that might happen to come out of me happens on an subconscious level, and no matter how hard I try, I have no control over what happens beyond competence. I have no understanding at all about how subconscious artistic stuff works. I'm really happy when it does, though.

As a critical listener (and as a reviewer) I am usually not impressed by competence. I can even be bored by competence, which is odd because I know how much work goes into writing a competent piece, giving a competent performance, or making a competent recording. As a critical listener I can tell when there is something special going on, and I can be impressed and even moved by a performance that has audible flaws. Clearly Hewitt did not intend his maxim to be interepreted by an audience of critics.

Dounis Update

Today I finished my first "pass" through Dounis Opus 12, and today I can actually play the Debussy Violin Sonata. B.D. (Before Dounis) I could muddle and guess through the piece, but now (I guess it would be A.D.) I can play all the notes most of the time.

I have not increased the amount of time I practice since doing my "row" of Dounis and Sevcik every day (it takes me about 45 or 50 minutes to do a "row," and I have been adding Sevcik bowing exercises), but I have improved the quality of my practice and the physical strength of my hands and fingers.

I absolutely believe that this kind of practice, switching from one activity and challenge to another, is the secret to achieving a state of technique on the violin.

like writing music in the old days

The igniter on our furnace decided to fail last night (and would you believe it was around zero degrees outside at midnight?), so this morning, while waiting for the plumber to return with a new igniter (it's a hot water heater), dressed in many layers, including a robe that would pass for a winter coat in 19th-century Russia, I was at the piano, working on writing a piece of music. Despite the fact that I was really cold (I could see my breath!), I kind of enjoyed the discomfort. I felt like I was transported to the olden days--the days before central heat, where the very discomfort of a person's physical situation during the cold winter months made it really appealing to seek out harmony for warmth and comfort.

The house is starting to get warmer (though it's not warm yet--the thermometer reads 50 degrees), and I'm at the computer, just having entered the spoils of my frozen labors into Finale. Writing in the cold was fun, but I will be happy when I get back to the 21st century.

Fritz Wunderlich

I can't remember where I read it, but when a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic was asked about how to learn to be a great violinist, his reply was to listen to Fritz Wunderlich's recordings. I agree with that violinist (whoever he may have been), and find that the correlation between diction and right hand violin articulation is present on every vowel and consonant Wunderlich sings. And every time I hear his recording of the Dicterliebe, a recording I have listened to at least a hundred times, I am both overwhelmed and comforted.

Here is Fritz Wunderlich in "The Magic Flute."



And here he is singing Lenski's aria in "Eugene Onegin."



I have never been very good at math, but here's a violinist-tenor equation: If Fritz Wunderlich = Michael Rabin, then Richard Tauber = Fritz Kreisler.

Who would balance DeStefano, Gigli, Caruso? and Bjorling? Any suggestions?

Those who can . . .

I feel very fortunate that I have difficulty with a great many things having to do with music, because the fact that I have to face my difficulties every day makes me a better teacher. The instrumental teachers who have really helped me have all been people who worked all the time to improve their own playing. Teachers who have tried to show me how "easy" it is to do something on their instrument, using spoken phrases like "play it smoothly" or "play it like you are in a grand cathedral" have never given me anything I couldn't give myself. As far as I'm concerned, phrases like that are meaningless when it comes to directing the thousands of neural transmitters and hundreds of muscles in the hands and arms to do what an accomplished player would call a simple maneuver. Students need to be told exactly how to accomplish a task, and they need to have the task broken down into steps that can be followed. The only way I learn, even from myself (I am my own teacher now), is by breaking down tasks and identifying and separating the difficulties.

Drawing the bow in a straight line, for example, is simple in concept, but it is probably one of the most difficult things for a string player to do, especially in circumstances that involve difficult left hand manipulations and odd harmonic situations. It is a perennial difficulty for me, something I always have to work on improving. Because I have this difficulty I can notice it in my students and help them improve their bow arms (which improves everything else). If I didn't have this, as well as a whole slew of other "challenges," I believe that the development of my students would suffer. If everything came easily to me, I don't think I would be much of a teacher. If I didn't have to work for what I have accomplished and for what I will accomplish, I don't think that I would ever feel satisfied as a musician.

The Food of Love

I guess my two constant creative activities are cooking food and composing music, and all of a sudden, while I was making vegan Chili today, I realized that they are quite similar.

First of all, cooking often requires a recipe. A piece of music in progress has one too: the instrumentation, form, key, and tempo of the piece. Cooking requires ingredients that work harmoniously together. So does a piece of music. Sometimes we use unusual food combinations (like sweetness and spice together--raisins and curry come to mind), and sometimes we use unusual harmonic combinations: dissonant intervals interspersed with consonant ones. Once the form is established in cooking, we have given parameters that we know will work, and we have ones that we know won't work. It is, for example, impossible to saute onions in raspberry jam.

My wastebasket has seen many examples of musical parallels to that sort of thing. If you want to have raspberries and onions in the same dish, you figure out ways of cooking the onions properly and adding the raspberries so that they do not fall apart and destroy your frying pan. If you want to have unlike elements working together in a piece of music you have to figure out a way for both (or all) of the elements to be heard. Every situation is different, and each problem needs its own unique solution.

After a lot of practice cooking you just know what ingredients work together. You can invent recipes based on classic models that taste totally different from their prototypes. It is the same with writing music. You can add an ethnic identity to a dish you are cooking with a combination of spices. You can do the same with a piece of music by incorporating harmonic or rhythmic elements and/or instruments from a particular culture, or you can combine elements from different cultures.

And then there's the question of taste...

Now it's time to get back to work.

Audio Musical Terms Dictionary

Wow. This Multimedia Music Dictionary from Virginia Tech is a pronouncing dictionary with audio clips of musical terms. It is a very useful tool, but it is also lots of fun to play with.

Tags: Musical Terms, Music Dictionary

The Way Leonard Rose Plays

Some very kind soul put this excerpt from an interview with Leonard Rose from The Way They Play on the Cello Heaven website. There's a lot of Dounis in Rose's approach to the cello. Actually, there's a lot of violin playing in his approach to the cello, which, translated into "cello," and articulated by an absolute master of the instrument, gives the lessons learned from Dounis a whole new meaning for me.

What's in a pseudonym?

I'm working on a set of songs with lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb (yes, "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" is one of them), and I have had to do some major sleuthing to find more old songs with Lamb lyrics. There are a few by Dorothy Lee, a composer who is new to me. Of course I thought it odd that a woman who was that proflic in the America of the 1920s would, by this time, be celebrated, collected, and written about by people seeking advanced degrees in musicology.

Then I found out that Dorothy Lee was a pseudonym (one of many) used by John Stepan Zamecnik (1872-1953), a student of Dvorak who lived in Cleveland until he moved to Los Angeles in 1924 to write music for silent films. He published more than 1500 pieces of music under 21 different pseudonyms for the Sam Fox publishing company, of which these 14 have been confirmed:

Lionel Baxter
R.L. (Robert) Creighton
Arturo de Castro
"Josh and Ted"
J. (Jane) Hathaway
Kathryn Hawthorne
Roberta Hudson
Ioane Kawelo
Dorothy Lee
J. Edgar Lowell
Jules Reynard
F. (Frederick) Van Norman
Hal Vinton
Grant Wellesley

Public Domain Sheet Music

I have to share this fantastic sheet music site that wants to be for sheet music what Project Gutenberg is for literature. The Mutopia Project has (so far) 756 pieces of music in the public domain to download for free as PDF files. Much of it is keyboard music for both organ and piano: lots of Bach, Chopin, Schumann, Diabelli, Mozart, and all of it is free and quite useful. There is also quite a collection of guitar music.

In addition to having the PDF file in both letter- and A4-sized documents, each piece comes with a downloadable MIDI file.

While I'm at it, here are a few more free sheet music sites:

Project Gutenberg has its own sheet music "department," and the Choral Public Domain Library has a tremendous collection of sheet music. They have been collecting music since 1998, and have 8324 scores to date. The Werner Icking Music Archive has other useful (and eclectic) pieces of information and links to various articles of interest, like a repository of common engraving mistakes.

I find this all very exciting.

Tags: Sheet music, Classical, PDF Music, Piano Music, Organ Music

Paganini

Yesterday, while I was practicing my "Daily Dounis," I hit upon something that sounded like Paganini. Just for fun, after I was finished with my Dounis, I opened up my Paganini Caprices to look for the specific passage. I was totally surprised to find that I could actually navigate my way through many of the Caprices, and actually realized that they are a lot of fun to play (not that I was really playing them) because they are so well written for the violin.

Today, after my Dounis, I think I might even pick one and start to work on it! It's really hard for me to believe that this is possible. I always thought that being able to play Paganini was one of those unreachable goals; kind of like being able to reach a high shelf without a stool.

Well, it is on to the challenges of the day for me.

Tags: paganini, violin, classical music

Musical Encounters up and down the fingerboard

When my kids were little we used to watch a show on PBS called "Musical Encounters." I believe it came from a West Coast television station, but wherever it was from, the show was remarkable. One show featured Josef Gingold and the 16-year-old Corey Cerovsek playing Wieniawski. Corey answered questions from the audience of young children about the dangers of playing in a tree house (what if a bird poops on your violin) and the paint on his violin ("actually, it's varnish" was a buzzword in our household for a while). Another show featured a pigtailed and freckled 9-year-old Leila Josefowicz storming through Boehm's Perpetual Motion, and another show featured two violin-playing brothers who were remarkable. When the audience asked them how they knew where the notes are on the violin, one brother's response was "you have to practice."

I often think of that simple statement when I am shifting around on the violin (or the viola today--it is an orchestra week, so I'm spending some quality time with my viola). Eventually we, by some mysterious alchemy and by a lot of practice, learn where the notes are up and down the strings the way we know where notes are in our own voices. It takes a long time, but once your body physically knows where a pitch is, the connection between hand and ear becomes automatic. It doesn't need to be interpreted by the conscious brain.

Four Greek Myths

Susan Nigro, the great American virtuoso of the contrabassoon, and Mark Lindeblad, her pianist-partner in musical adventures around and about the lower ledger lines of the bass clef, played my Four Greek Myths for contrabassoon and piano on a concert at Northwestern University in October. They sent me a recording that you can listen to here if you like.

Tags: Contrabassoon, Greek Myths, classical music, new music, piano

Grieg Lyric Pieces

I have spent the last few days listening to a recording of Aldo Ciccolini playing all the Grieg Lyric Pieces (the recording is on a Swiss label: Cascavelle VEL 3083), and I am totally enchanted. Most people know the famous ones like Grandmother's Minuet, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, and Puck, but taking the time to listen to all ten volumes of these Lyric Pieces makes me realize once again what a phenomenal composer Edvard Grieg was, especially as a composer of music for the piano. It is funny. I often hear the influence of previous composers when I listen to 19th century music. In Schumann, for example, I often hear the influence of Schubert and Mendelssohn, in Mendelssohn I often hear the influence of Mozart and Beethoven, but when I listen to Grieg, I don't hear anyone specific from his musical past. I hear what future composers might have heard in his music. I hear what might have influenced Debussy to a certain extent, and what might have influenced Gershwin to a great extent.

Tags: Edvard Grieg, Lyric Pieces, Aldo Ciccolini