A Free Mind

I love taking a walk and listening to music because it frees my mind. Sometimes my concentration goes directly to the music, and then it bounces around from foreground to background, from thematic material, to lyrics (if there are lyrics), to structure, to sound, to sound production, and to various other musical associations, like the relationship of the piece at hand to something I listened to at another time. Sometimes the music becomes background to my thoughts, while I fly off on tangents, follow various lines of thought, plan, fantasize, observe, and react to the world around me. (Somehow when I listen to Mozart I tend to become acutely aware of things like the shapes and states of leaves and flowers.)

And then I bounce back into what is happening in the music.

It is an inner world devoid of external responsibility: I know the parameters of my walk, and can think what I want in the time I have. The rhythmic physical movement of my walk is rarely in time with the music. It is as if the life of my body and the life of my mind are separate entities that coexist for the hour I spend on my walk (as opposed to the time I spend practicing, where the mind and body are constantly interacting in both conscious and unconscious ways).

When I am listening to something that I am going to review, I have to listen critically. The habit of free association that I have developed on these walks allows me to be honest in my assessment of the recordings I review, translating the fear of not having something worthwhile to say, into a free-flowing safety zone, where all thoughts are acceptable, and all thoughts are equal.

But listening without having to write a review is kind of like a vacation.

Look and Listen

I just came across this drawing on Nathan Ables' Minutiae, and realized that if you were simply to change the word "look" to the word "listen," in the first panel, you would find that music might be taking the same detour that art seems to be taking.

Fun with Life

The Life Magazine photo archive has pictures of some unlikely violinists. Here's Jayne Mansfield playing for her dog, Rudolf Serkin, looking extremely uncomfortable with a violin, Jascha Heifetz playing for Helen Keller, Marlene Dietrich playing the saw (with a violin bow), and many more treats (tons of Heifetz bow arm "light impressions," Alexander Schneider, Jack Benny, and Fritz Kreisler pictures, to name only a few).

UC Bjoerling?

I never met Roger Lebow, but I knew his mother, Marcia Lebow, very well when I lived in Boston, so I knew a great deal about him. You can imagine! I also followed his son Theo's career, by way of Marcia, from diapers to child stardom.

Anyway, today I came across his name (and a video of a celebration of his 60th birthday) on Mixed Meters. A look at his biography (see the above link), shows that the apple did indeed not fall from the tree of family humor. Incidentally, I first met Marcia when she was 61. With measurements like these, times does indeed fly.

Perhaps the Bjoerling joke is an old one, but it was new to me.

UPDATE: Marcia Lebow's Obituary in the L.A. Times

Amazin Ewazen

What a treat it is to see Eric Ewazen's picture on the cover of the upcoming Fanfare magazine, and to read this article about him.

I knew Eric at Juilliard. We both started there at the same time (he was in the doctoral program as a composer, and I was a freshman flutist). I always thought of Eric as a kind of good-natured version of what Brahms might have been like, though I don't really didn't know why at the time. Perhaps it was because Brahms was my standard for greatness (and I suppose he still is).

Like most of the other young composers working in "serious" music during the 1970s and 1980s, Eric wrote serial music. His music, or what I knew of it, had nothing to do with tonality. It was difficult for me to understand intellectually, but, under the organized mask of the times, there was a huge amount of emotional substance, exuberance, lyricism, and a total lack of pretense. I always thought that if atonality was to be the "classical" medium of the future, Eric would be its Brahms. I always believed that Eric would be, above all the composers I knew at Juilliard, the person who would have his (they were all men at the time) music played and enjoyed by the most people.

I remember the satisfied thrill I got in the early 1990s when I read a review of one of Eric's brass pieces that had been recorded, and I got even more of a thrill when I heard his post-Juilliard music. It was all tonal. It was tonal, yet it did bear some resemblance to his atonal music: the same face, but wearing different clothing, perhaps. A lot of Eric's music was (and is) accessible for college-age students to understand, challenging for brass players (of all ages and levels of experience) to play, and very exciting to hear. Here is a movement from his Trumpet Sonata, and a trio for the unlikely combination of violin, trumpet, and piano, and this fantastic marimba concerto.

Little-by-little Ewazen pieces started popping up on brass players' recitals at my local university. Soon it was almost impossible to attend a brass recital without an Ewazen piece on the program. I have since learned that this happens at a lot of other universities. Though he is most popular as a composer for brass and percussion instruments, he writes music for all kinds of instrumental and vocal combinations, and has been commissioned (and is being commissioned) to write music for some very high-profile soloists and orchestras.

It is great, in this world of hype and pretense, to have such well-deserved success come to someone who is made of substance and integrity. The exuberance in his music is real: it simply reflects and projects who he is. He is, as we used to refer to him back in his Juilliard days, "Amazin Ewazen."

Robert Levin on Improvisation

Monday Waltz

Here is a link to a PDF and an audio file of Monday Waltz a brand new addition to the waltz family.

The piece has nothing to do with Monday. It began as a monody a few months ago, grew a few more voices, and started dancing. "Monody Waltz" looks a lot like "Monday Waltz," so there you have it.

Classic Cartoon Classics

Thanks to Michael, I can link to the Ten Best Uses of Classical Music in Classic Cartoons. Michael found this by way of the Coudal Partners website.

While my mind is on musical cartoons, I'll share one by the Czechoslovakian animator Zdenek Miler.

Nifty Notation

Imagine my surprise today when, while at the library, I opened up a copy of Couperin's Pieces de Clavecin and found this:



(Heeding the copyright violation warning on the published volume, which had some outrageous doodads attached to ties in many of the preludes, I decided not to do any illegal photocopying. Instead, I searched for a public domain image, which appears to be a photograph of the manuscript.)

Cooking as One of the Performing Arts

It wasn't really that long ago that the term "Performing Arts" was used to refer to music, dance, and drama. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for example, covered those three disciplines. The term "Fine and Applied Art" or "Fine Arts" referred to painting, sculpture, print-making, and drawing.

Now that we have all kinds of new media that fall under neither the "Performing Arts" umbrella or the "Fine Arts" umbrella, like film, video, and all kinds of multi-media installations that combine the "Fine" and "Performing" Arts, we call the whole thing "The Arts." The term "Artist," the the term "Art," has come to be used far more loosely than it has in centuries past, or even in decades past.

Julia Child might have been the first to refer to cooking as "art" in the title of her 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she certainly was one of the pioneers in the world of cooking on television. But it is the Food Network that has really turned the act of cooking into a performing art. The Next Food Network Star is an odd kind of performing art competition, because the actual substance of the "art" (the thing that is made) is evaluated not only on its substance, but on its presentation.

We in the television audience cannot eat the food that is made, so we are put in the position of having the "food" experience by evaluating the personality and performance of each finalist, and having the actual result (the taste of the food) reported to us by someone we do not know personally. It is tough. Food preparation is judged as a creative art, a performing art, and as a "plastic" art: what it is and how it looks is as important as how the chef relates to the audience and the camera. The judges for The Next Food Network Star are people who take the business of "food performance" seriously, and would be the equivalent to well-seasoned soloists (I couldn't resist the pun) and highly-experienced teachers in the field of music.

I think that The Next Food Network Star is a very smart show. I learn a great deal from the comments that the judges make, and I draw inspiration from the challenges the contestants have to meet, especially when I am faced with the daily challenge of making meals. Most of the contestants have to draw upon skills that they never had the chance or reason to develop, either in cooking school or in professional cooking life. Those who have performing skills from extra-food-related experiences have certain advantages over those who have ideas and experiences only informed by the world of food preparation.

Perhaps the future will hold performing arts academies for cooks. Who knows. There could be classes in diction and elocution (in several languages). There could be classes that concerned posture, focus, and movement, as well as style, make-up, and persona-building. Students could study the video record: Kerr, Child, Ray, Flay, and they write papers on the difference between stoic "Iron Chef" focus, and the almost-too-personal Nigella touch.

Food, like music, has no permanence, but it does touch some of the senses in a way that remains, and even lingers. As music does with time and sound, cooking as an art takes the mundane and necessary (eating and food preparation are both necessary), and turns it into something special. A meal, served in courses, could be likened to a sonata or a symphony that is served in movements, or a play, ballet, or opera that is served in acts. It is visually appealing, like dance, and the experience of it can even momentarily involve sound (consider the crunch), but on television we have to rely on third-party reporting to have the sensual experience that the food is designed to have: taste.

Music can be transmitted over the airwaves (or now, over the digital media) almost intact, but food can not. Digital reproductions of two-dimensional visual art can come strikingly close to the real thing. Camera work (which has also become an art in itself) is so fine that the experience of dance on a video screen can be as exciting as seeing it on a stage. We can all evaluate these arts in their intended form by way of media, but try as we may, we just can't do it with food.

Imagine composers' works being evaluated only on what we say about our music to a camera, because the people who might be interested in hearing it would not be able to. Imagine if performing musicians had to talk to the audience and look at a camera while performing, but no sound could from their instruments or out of their singing mouths. Imagine if sculptors and painters had to have their work evaluated purely on what they had to say about it on camera. And how would a dancer or a choreographer speak effectively about movement without making any kind of a gesture?

So many choices!

I have been thinking a lot about Michael's "No idea what to do" post quite a bit these past few days. We talked about the fact that we always told our kids that they could be what they wanted to be, and wondered if we did the right thing. Perhaps one of the problems has to do with the difference between "doing" and "being." I believe we concentrated on the being part, which is much more essential than the "doing" part. The idea of being has to do with the world within, and the idea of doing has to do with the ever-changing world without--a world that we can only understand partially and subjectively.

I remember an assignment we had when I was in third grade. We were asked to draw a picture of ourselves as "what you want to be when you grow up." Being the 1960s, most of the girls in the class drew teachers and nurses, and most of the boys drew firemen, cowboys, and, perhaps, garbage collectors. Everyone drew themselves in some kind of profession, taking the "be" of the question as meaning the phrase "do for a living." I drew a picture of a genderless, pants-wearing army officer, walking down the street and whistling, with a little dog. My tomboy dream was to be in the army, at least while I was in third grade. I was also rather athletic, and was tantalized by the idea of getting a President's Council for Physical Fitness patch. Perhaps I was a tad patriotic as well.

Eventually these things faded with time. I knew I'd never have a dog. I knew that I would never grow up to be a man, or to even look like one. And I never got one of those President's Council for Physical Fitness patches. Perhaps it was because my school didn't offer them.

I stopped getting my hair cut at the barber shop (I didn't have a whole lot of guidance in those days), and eventually embraced my girl-hood with its proscribed (gasp) future in teacher-hood, mother-hood, and nurse-hood. Once I could wear pants to school on non-gym days, the door to a productive future seemed to be a little larger than the doors to the elementary school gym, or the school playground, where I spent hours climbing on the jungle-gym.

Eventually I slipped into music, the family business, because I was good at it, because I liked it, and because it was the only thing I could do. I felt kind of envious of my female classmates, empowered by the sudden surge of the women's movement, who seemed to look towards their futures with a newly-minted element of choice. I was particularly envious of the people who wanted to be doctors, because I could not understand the lure of the profession. Perhaps many of them also went into "the family business."

Nobody told me that I could be anything I wanted to be, professionally or otherwise. If somebody had told me, I wouldn't have believed them anyway. One by one the things I thought I was good at seemed to slip away, like math, science, and athletics, and a future in music seemed like the only path for me. I had no idea that the musical world was so big and so populated with people like me; and I had no idea that the actual number of musical opportunities for someone like me was so small. I also had no idea that I would be doing the kinds of things I am doing in music, or that music would be one of the ways I would define who I am.

Our kids, now in their 20s, are good at a lot of things. And they have (or are in the process of getting) an education. They have both had jobs that they would not consider "professions," jobs that you do in order to make money in order to live. But they both know that they can "be" whoever and whatever they want to be, and I think it gives them strength and hope.

Muslim Magomov

Otherwise known as Муслим Магомаев, this Baritone from Azerbaijan is simply remarkable. I don't understand much Russian, but I believe every single word he sings. His voice has such flexibility and such an array of colors. It was difficult for me to decide which recording to put here: they are all great, and some are truly outrageous. You need to wait for a while before he makes it over to the piano, but it is indeed worth the wait. After you hear this one, paste the Russian spelling of his name (above) into YouTube, and enjoy your day in style. How is it that I have never heard of this man before? And how did I find him anyway? Must be fate.



He also has a personal website, which is well worth exploring. I particularly like the "hobby" section.

America First Day 1924: We've come a long way

The people who made this poster back in 1924 had a certain vision for an ideal American society. Many of the ideals are still viable, and many simply cannot be attained. Abolition of caste and class? Not likely. And religious liberty, to be reinforced by "patriotic religious services" in West Virginia? And what's this about "womanhood" as something to "regard" like childhood and old age?

Perhaps this July 4, 2009, we can consider how far we've come, and how far we have to go as a nation and as a society.

Regional Culture

Not that you personally knew every man, woman, and child who walked down the street in Jersey City. But you knew them well enough, could immediately see down into their dusty souls. You knew they had eaten hot dogs at Boulevard Drinks, had gone to the matinees at the Loew's, had relatives who worked for either the Parks Department or Public works and had paid that 85-cent toll on the New Jersey Turnpike a few too many times. You knew what their wardrobe looked like, what their dates looked like, and the kinds of teachers they had--what they had learned or, more important, what they had failed to learn at a place like OLC [Our Lady of Czestochowa].

From Helene Stapinski's Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History.

Change the specifics, and you have my town, and maybe, with another change of specifics, you'd get your town. Wouldn't you know it, Stapinski also wrote a book about being a musician!

Having Your Cake

There weren't any cellists at Summer Strings last night, so I played the cello parts (on the viola), which was a new and interesting treat. We were playing this arrangement of the Fiocco Allegro, where the melodic material is divided between the first and second violins, and the lower voices spend a lot of time as continuo players.

The violists, being new to continuo playing, needed a bit of guidance. I suggested a way for them to use their bows that would not sound too plodding, and still be rhythmic and directional--a way that would make it possible to support as well as hear the interplay between the upper voices.

I told them it was like cake. The fiddles are the frosting, and the rest of us are like the cake. The frosting is pretty, and it is what you see and pay attention to, but it's still called cake.