Hang Tough

My friend Carrie sent this piece of sage advice given to her by Roger Lebow that I'd like to share:

I'm told things are wretched. So we'll hope for music, offered without propriety, without restraint, and straight from the soul. Let it be excessive. Let it make a scene. Hang tough.

This speaks volumes to me. Whether classical music is "dying" as a profession, or not, it is still vital for musicians to be musicians. It doesn't matter if you can't make a living from playing it or writing it (a relative few of us really do), and it really doesn't matter whether playing it on your own terms (like playing a recital of music you love) is "play for pay" or "play for play."

The profession is changing drastically. I have watched it change in front of my eyes. There are far more people in it, the technical level is higher than ever, and the materials necessary to play (including good teachers) are more accessible than ever. Expectations are up, and audiences are smaller now because there is not only competition for the "leisure dollar," but competition for the leisure minute.

Honest and informed concert reviews are hard to find, and it seems that what used to be music criticism is being supplanted with promotional copy. A handful of brand-name soloists have star power, and the rest of the truly excellent musicians around wonder if anyone will ever notice the value of what they do. Everything seems to be disposable--something of the moment that is soon forgotten. As individuals and as institutions we can try to change things, but ultimately we can't make much of a dent, so most of us play for the people who want it (need it), and, if we want to maintain our sanity, we don't worry about having what kind of "impact" it makes on the larger world.

But music itself is still the same. I have never been more excited about playing the violin, because I can finally (in my second decade as a violinist) play the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata. The concert I'm giving with my pianist friend John David next Sunday is not going to be an attempt at the Kreutzer (and the Brahms D minor, and the Bach F-minor, BWV 1018). It's going to be a performance. I can finally play the fiddle well enough to actually play the music. For the past 200 years, millions of violinists and pianists around the world have felt the same sense of honor, awe, and power involved in standing at the threshold of really being able to play this music. That is one thing that doesn't change. Roger's statement bears repeating:

I'm told things are wretched. So we'll hope for music, offered without propriety, without restraint, and straight from the soul. Let it be excessive. Let it make a scene. Hang tough.

Magic Mozaht Moment with Mahjorie

Here's another piece of "Mem-wah" gold from Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi.

Influence and Imitation

Somehow my comment on Ron Davis' post over at Chamber Musician Today got labeled as an anonymous one, so I thought I'd reproduce it here, because it is something I truly believe (and I'm kind of proud of writing):

I think that this is an appropriate place to draw the line between jazz, which is ideally a kind of music that involves spontaneous improvisation, and what we call "classical music," a kind of music that involves an exact series of directions that are written by a composer with the intention that they will be played as written, and enhanced by the tonal and interpretative imagination of the performer.

Jazz also relies on a kind of tradition in order for it to be recognized as Jazz. Influence and types of inflection, having to do with diction, tone color and tone production, articulation, and rhythmic swing are of utmost importance. Therefore imitation is vital. A lot of iconic jazz musicians (the people chosen to be imitated) did not notate their music, so imitation from sound alone is probably the purest way of keeping the music alive.

"Classical" music is kind of the opposite. I know that I carry all kinds of influence in the music that I write, but I am rarely aware of it at the time of writing (and sometimes I cringe when I hear a performance, years after writing a piece, where the performer notices a bit of "homage" and brings it out). In "classical" music it is important to learn techniques. Everybody worth his or her salt as a composer is able to employ techniques used by great composers of the past, including great composers of the past. But what "classical" composers strive for is to find ways of expression and organization that are true to his or her own sense of music. The danger sign for a composer is when one piece that he or she writes does sound too much like another.

People in the visual art world are encouraged to find a medium and a style that they can perfect within that medium. You have sculptors, oil painters, print makers, watercolor painters, people who draw with pencil, people who do their visual art in abstract, people who are realistic painters, people who assemble objects, people who specialize in collage, people who make objects, people who design . . . The list goes on and on. I believe that success for a visual artist would be to make work that can be instantly identified as a work by that person, yet can be unique in its individual expression.

Composers need to be able to work in every medium, but success, to a certain degree is similar to the success experience by a visual artist described in the above paragraph. When I turn on the radio and can be sure that a piece I have never heard before is by Bartok, Barok has been successful. If I turn on the radio and hear a piece that sounds like the composer was influenced by Bartok, and that influence is all I can hear (I know, it is rare to even hear anything post-Bartok on the radio these days), perhaps the composer of the piece has only succeeded in showing his or her influences.

Still, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of my musical experience define the limits of my musical world.

Related Post: Imitation v. Creation

OMG: It's Dorothy Delay, and we're not in Kansas anymore

When did you say your performance of the Mendelssohn will be, Margaret?"

"Margie," I corrected. "I'll be playing it in a couple of weeks."

"Where dear? I've forgotten."

"In Kansas, with the City Symphony."

"That's right," said Miss DeLay with a smile. "Mention Kansas and I become nostalgic. That's where I grew up—in Medicine Lodge."

"You don't say," I replied with feigned interest.

Here's another must-read installment in Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi's Frantic: the memoir.

Tension and Release: Alpha and Omega

After all these years practicing, listening to, writing about, and teaching music, the most fundamental unifying musical principal finally dawned on me. It happened while I was teaching a class. I heard myself say, while I was explaining the structure of the harpsichord cadenza in the Bach Brandenburg Concerto #5, the words "tension and release," and after class I realized that all music involves the successful or unsuccessful use of these two elements in proportion to one another.

Sonata form, for example, is all about tension and release. The repeat of an exposition is a release from tension (if set up properly by the performing musicians), a development section is all about setting up and building up the tension (harmonic and otherwise) that gives the recapitulation a feeling of release. Rondo form has the same buildup of tension and release, but it happens in different places in the movement. A successful multi-movement work "works" because of the sense of tension and release that happens between movements.

Bach often uses chromaticism to set up tension, and he relieves it in all sorts of ways: sometimes he does it gradually, sometimes he does it abruptly with tempo, sometimes he does it covertly, and sometimes he does it by resolving something cleverly (there are too many examples of this to name).

The observation and transmitting of musical tension is the responsibility of the performing musicians, but the composer is responsible for putting the necessary elements in the best order, and controlling the progression of the tension and release by using harmonic and melodic material, dynamics, orchestration, and tempo.

The ability to work successfully with the balance of tension and release is what divides the great composers from the good ones. An unsuccessful buildup of tension by a performing musician (or group of musicians) can make listening to even the most expertly-written piece unbearable, and an unsuccessful release of tension can make the most successful buildup of tension almost meaningless.

We have the responsibility as composers to be as vigilant as possible to balance the tension and release in our pieces, and as performing musicians we have the responsibility to follow the trajectory of the tension and release written into the music, and give performances that reflect a natural balance. It is much easier to do with "expert" music than it is to do with music that is less-well-written, and it's much easier to do with "common practice" music than with music that does not rely on harmony and melody to build up and release tension.

Music of the Spheres: Earth-sized Exoplanet

An enticing new extrasolar planet found using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii is just three times the mass of Earth and it orbits the parent star squarely in the middle of the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” a potential habitable region where liquid water could exist on the planet‘s surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one. The discoverers also say this finding could mean our galaxy may be teeming with prospective habitable planets.

“Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said Steven Vogt from UC Santa Cruz. “The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.”

Read the article in Universe Today, and let your mind sing.

When is an object not an object? When it's an instrument.

I had some major work done on my fiddle. It now has a new bridge and soundpost, its first "update" in the 17 years I have owned it. It also has new strings, and a freshly-rehaired bow. During its rehabilitation I spent time practicing my daughter's lovely and very-easy-to-play violin, and established a relationship with it: I set its parts into motion, and it sent me back all kinds of sounds that made me very happy. They were not sounds in my usual violin "voice," but they were sounds in my daughter's violin "voice," so the pleasure was rather personal. It was really the first time I had intimate contact with a violin other than my own.

My fiddle sounded horrible when it came back from its "makeover." I couldn't find any familiar sound anywhere, particularly in the upper positions. It kind of felt like an object to me: perhaps a violin-shaped box that used to hold my former instrument. I knew that everything was "right," but it didn't sound right or feel right. My reaction was to do the only thing I could do: subject it to a week of Dounis and Sevcik: shifting up and down the strings, forcing it to play double stops and generate difference tones, until I didn't have to use force anymore.

Now I have my violin voice back. Thank goodness.

This proves that an instrument is a living thing: something that bends to the will of the person playing it, and something with a definite and unique personality.

Tea at the Drake and More with Van Dyke Parks

Michael and I made a jaunt up to Chicago yesterday to hear Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons play a concert at Schubas, a restaurant and concert venue on the near north side. Michael, who named his blog after "Orange Crate Art," one of Van Dyke Parks' most charming songs, has been a devoted fan for years and years. After having tea with him at the Drake Hotel, I have joined the ranks of his admirers. I was totally charmed by his sharp-as-a-diamond-stylus wit, his style, and his extreme generosity.

Unfortunately the tea menu at the Drake has little to offer to vegans besides tea, so while Van Dyke and Michael enjoyed what I think was a lemon curd, some clotted cream, and an array of dainty-but-rich cakes and scones, I had an order of something called "Little Miss Sandwiches" (peanut butter and jelly), which is pictured above.

The palm court (mais sans palms) atmosphere of the Drake, which is really quite well-suited to Van Dyke Parks' music, had harp music for their afternoon tea. Penny Currier was our harpist du jour, and when she came over to our table to thank the nice man who gave her a tip (who obviously knew something about the harp), she probably had no idea who he was.

We brought Van Dyke back to his hotel, and went to the Schubas, where we had dinner (they make a great vegan burrito). We then made our way into the concert room where I observed a few rituals that were odd to me. I ask my music appreciation students to write about the protocol they notice at their (often first) experience at a classical concert. This was my first time going to a non-classical concert in a venue like this one, and I did notice some odd customs that seemed to be protocol.

The concert room at Schubas has benches along one side wall, four or five tables with chairs along the other, and the middle is an open floor. I made a beeline for one of the tables (luckily we were in the front of the line of people waiting to get in), and claimed a seat. I noticed that other people made their beelines for particular places to stand, and there they stood. People didn't talk, really. They just stood. Eventually the place filled up modestly, and the show began about 20 minutes later than announced, after the musicians quietly made their way, in dribs and drabs, onto the stage. There was no audience applause.

Olivier Manchon, a sparklingly-talented violinist (among other things) greeted the audience with an imitation of Ira Glass from "This American Life," and the show began. All the members of the ensemble have beautiful voices, and most of them double on various instruments. A brass trio (French horn, trombone, and bass trombone) from Chicago joined the core group of violin, cello, and bass with various doubles on clarinet, keyboard, washboard, glockenspiel, electric bass, percussion, and plastic soprano recorder. The most audacious double of the evening was when Manchon, while playing the guitar, took breaks (without missing beats) to play left-handed recorder and right-handed glockenspiel simultaneously. I was quite impressed when Manchon would sing (back up) while playing the violin, which is something I find almost impossible to do because of the vibrations that occur between my neck and the instrument.

The arrangements were excellent, and the ensemble playing was disciplined and precise, but not mechanical. The sound was successfully amplified so that the two string players, who simply used standing stage microphones on their acoustic instruments, were nicely balanced to the brass, who did not use amplification. The result was more of an "enhanced" acoustic sound than an electronically-created one. The group did incorporate sampled electronic sounds very tastefully into their arrangements, which impressed me quite a bit.

More people arrived during the course of the show, and by the time Van Dyke Parks came on stage to play with the group, the hall was full of tall people standing. If I had been standing (I really don't like to listen to music standing up if I can sit down), I wouldn't have been able to see anyway. I was able to catch a glimpse here and there.

After a short intermission Van Dyke Parks, Manchon, the cellist of the ensemble whom they called "tiny," and the bass player played a set of songs and chamber music. Van Dyke, who at tea was irrepressibly witty and lovable, was irrepressibly witty and lovable on stage, but even more so because he had a microphone and a keyboard. He began the set with the "lion's roar" from Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals," and then launched into a Br'er Rabbit-based bit of story and song, which then moved into other mixtures of his Southern-influenced (but not too much) idealistic Americana. He made very serious cultural comments that he dressed up in a kind of semi-mockery, which made some members of the audience laugh. Some members of the audience got a little nervous when Van Dyke played some very heartfelt Gottschalk in a beautiful arrangement for keyboard and strings, but little by little they understood that they were experiencing music that defies the genres that people have been using to try to make sense of the great kaleidoscope and smorgasbord of music that they have been lucky enough to have at their fingertips since recorded music became so easy to "acquire" and enjoy. It was all simply beautiful music, that was exquisitely played and sung, and was offered in a spirit of true warmth and generosity.

Van Dyke Parks' jokes and banter were funny, but I won't repeat them here, just in case someone reading this is planning to go to an upcoming show on this tour. Towards the end of the concert he did comment on the oddity of people standing in the front of the audience. Perhaps for some of the future shows on this tour, if this is indeed custom to have this kind of standing arrangement, someone might accommodate the audience with some chairs in the front, so that the people who want to stand can see above the people who are seated.

Be sure to read Michael Leddy's post about the concert.

Here are the next stops on the tour:

9.28 – Pittsburgh, PA – Andy Warhol Museum
9.29 – Toronto, ON – Music Gallery
9.30 – Montreal – Ukrainian Federation (Pop Montreal)
10.1 – Northampton, MA – Iron Horse
10.2 – Brooklyn, NY – The Bell House
10.3 – Philadelphia, PA – World Cafe
10.6 – Grantham, PA – Messiah College (Clare and the Reasons solo)

That Violinistic Je Ne Sais Quoi

Actually in the case of violin playing, Je sais quoi. After a lot of careful (and not so careful) thought, I have figured out what it is that sets Antal Szalai apart from the other violinists in the 2010 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. It is his deep understanding of the Auer tradition--the tradition that Leopold Auer inherited from Joseph Joachim. Perhaps it is his participation in that tradition that makes Szalai sound like a violinist from a different time. He is, as far as I'm concerned, a consummate professional. The rest of the violinists (many who are quite a bit younger than him), sound like they are gifted and capable students, who have nerves of steel, and know their way around the violin. You can hear the difference in just a few notes.

The "old-world" European tradition (particularly the Jewish European tradition) seems almost scarce in the modern world of high-profile violinists. I imagine it is partly due to the proportionately large number of non-European violinists who are no longer emotionally connected with the fiddle playing tradition (the tradition that inspired much of the violin's best repertoire) that has its roots in Odessa and St. Petersburg. It is possible to learn the art of musical inflection and to find something genuinely beautiful to project in Bloch's Nigun or Auer's Hebrew Melody, but direct experience with the world those pieces come from is something that can't really be taught. You don't have to be Jewish (for example) to play these pieces in a totally satisfying way, but you have to have internalized the pathos of the tradition in order to project it. If you do not, all an audience could hope to experience would be impressively clean and in-tune playing, impeccable rhythm, a beautiful sound with a lovely vibrato, a bit of showmanship, and a surface sheen. These are admirable qualities (some of which I hope to attain some day), but they are not enough for me as a listener. Those elements alone, without the pathos, generally do not satisfy my needs.

Szalai is, in my mind, a worthy successor to Augustin Hadelich. What a thrill it would to hear the two of them play together some day. Prokofiev anyone? How about a recording of some Bartok Duets?

Let's hope that all the judges (who do not confer with one another at all during this competition) are all of sound mind.

UPDATE: Je ne sais porquoi: here's the order of the laureates. I do think that Kang is an excellent violinist. My statement above still stands, and keeps my violinistic tastes firmly planted in the "old school."

1. Clara-Jumi Kang
2. Soyoung Yoon
3. Benjamin Beilman
4. Haoming Xie
5. Antal Szalai
6. Andrey Baranov

Spectacular Bartok Alert

I heard a knock-your-Hungarian-socks-off performance of the Bartok Violin Concerto from the Finals of International Violin Competition of Indianapolis this evening that was streamed live from the performance. Part of the joy of listening to this was to observe the way the orchestra responded to Szalai's "mother tongue" sense of color in the piece. Figurative lightbulbs were turning on above the heads of the musicians in the orchestra, and I imagined thought balloons that read, "Oh, so this is what the piece is about." The recording of it is archived here. Unfortunately mac computers require a special plug-in to listen successfully to the archived performances (which I couldn't find through the link). The fiddle player was Antal Szalai, who happens to be the son of the great gypsy fiddler Antal Szalai.

True tales from an old autograph book

Consecutive entries:

"The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the rest are cretins." -- Hans von Bülow

"The three greatest composers are Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Moszkowski. All the others are Christians!" -- Moritz Moszkowski

Nuts and Cracked: How Far From Ballet Can You Get?

My son Ben found this during his routine movie-preview watching, and I just have to share it here:



Clara is changed to Mary, the Nutcracker has essentially become Pinnochio, and, because the story is set in Vienna, there seems to be an appearance (according to the cast list) by Freud's twin nieces. Freud did actually have two nieces: Lucie Freud 1926-1933, and Margarethe Freud 1915-1931, but they weren't twins by any stretch of the imagination. There is also an appearance by a character named "Goebbels," who may or may not be based on Joseph Goebbels of Nazi propaganda fame. I don't see any dancing or sugar plum fairies, but there are a lot of stunt people, and visual-effects people.

I Got Algorithm!

What a hoot it was to find that the folks over at Wikio have listed Musical Assumptions as one of their top 20 classical music blogs! I'm glad that people enjoy coming here, looking around, and spending enough time for the algorithm-fairies to make it register. Who could ask for anything more?

. . . Speaking of Lucia Sextets

Michael mentioned the ever-popular Sextet from Lucia that was being streamed over the telephone in 1910.

In this version of the piece (which I take quite personally, given the text) we get to see, once again, that Larry Fine (sadly no relation to the Philadelphia Fines) is indeed a real violinist:

Anonymous Analogy

My friend Carrie sent me an e-mail message that included this article, but her message had a bit of extra commentary at the end (which appeared in one of the comments on the article). This analogy by a person who identifies herself or himself as "Violafire" is really worth sharing:

As a longtime professional musician, I’ve always felt that there might be ways to help the general public understand the kind of life we really lead. Since everybody knows how to type these days, why not have people use that skill to understand a musician’s life?

First, get an old manual (non-electric) typewriter. On an old Underwood or Remington, the pressure of the fingers shows up on the paper.

Next, find something really old to type, perhaps a random page or two of the Bible, or the first page of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Start typing—make sure you don’t make any mistakes.

Then, you’ll have to type in a rhythm, let’s say: “Shave and a hair cut, two bits.” Keep it up, without making any mistakes. Have a friend (or enemy) indicate how fast to do this.

Now, all nouns should be made heavier than usual, and all adjectives should be lighter than usual. And make sure everything else is in between, and even.

How’s that working out for ya? Do your fingers hurt, is your brain perhaps a little taxed, is your “friend” a little too relentless about the speed?

Don’t worry, after an hour and 15 minutes of this, you get a break!