Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Madam Viardot's Tooth

I am head over heels in love with Charles Villiers Stanford's piano and string chamber music, particularly his Second Piano Quartet, a piece that he left unpublished at the time of his death in 1924. It was played for the first time in 2010, and has just been recorded, along with a wonderful piano trio and a bunch of violin and piano pieces, on Naxos.

In looking for Stanford-related material, I came across his Pages from an Unwritten Diary in the Petrucci Library. In this excerpt he writes about Pauline Viardot, another one of my musical heroes.


[click for a larger view]

Kadynja and Reel de Marguerite

This is Ben's banjo medley of Kadynja (from Moldova, the "new" name for Besserabia, the homeland of my grand maternal ancestors--and Ben's great-grand-maternal ancestors), and Reel de Marguerite, which is French Canadian:

Movie Music

I love the idea of going "to the movies," but I don't go very often because the mini-megaplex located on a highway near us (they closed the theater in our town) rarely shows movies I want to see. Every time I go, I am bombarded by the volume they set for movies, and even more bombarded by the coming attractions.

I know that my family tires of me stepping out and asking the concession stand workers to ask the projectionist to turn down the volume, so Last night, for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I brought a set of earplugs.



Even with the earplugs, the coming attractions were almost unbearable. They all seem to use a constant ultra-low bass drone that makes my stomach and its surrounding digestive organs rumble. I wonder if this is an intentional way to get people viscerally excited about seeing something, particularly when the movie may just be an "updated" version of an proven classic like The Shining or Jaws. Without earplugs the bombardment is all-encompassing (and I believe dangerous), with earplugs it's possible to hear the manipulative rumble-bass layer.

I used to want to write film music. There is so much of it, particularly music for films made in the 30s, 40s, and 50s that I truly love. Given my age and location (as well as many other factors), I can't imagine that the possibility of writing film music will ever come up for me, but if this high-volume manipulative-bass stuff is what writing film music has come to, I don't think I would even be interested.

I did like the movie, by the way.

On Being a Trendsetter

Instead of wearing sunscreen on my walks this summer, I have been wearing a straw hat. It allows me to have shade wherever I walk, and it really does keep my head cool. I never thought of myself as a trendsetter, but this morning EVERY WOMAN I saw while I was on my walk was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses. It made me chuckle through my Mozart.

The Connaughtman's Rambles / Old Grimes

This is our son and his new banjo!

Pop Music Ramble

Years ago (and for 12 years), I worked as the classical music director for a college radio station. My job was to program the classical music, which ran from 8 to 12 every morning, and to teach novice students (who often didn't have the least bit of interest in classical music, but wanted to be on the radio) how to speak properly, pronounce "foreign" names properly, how to flip records (yes, we used turntables back then), and to begin to understand something about the music that they were playing.

I remember one of my students saying something like, "Some of this music actually has a beat to it." I was puzzled by her comment. Of course music has a "beat" to it. That's what I call rhythm and/or meter. But I came to understand that "beat" means something different in pop music from what it means in music of the "non-pop." (Insert your own Clemens-non-papa joke here.) I realized that conforming to a established "beat" is one of the essential elements involved in writing successful 21st-century pop music.

The pop song When You Make Love To Me (Don't Make Believe) that Jascha Heifetz wrote under the pseudonym of Jim Hoyl, is an appropriate mixture of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. There's nothing in it that sounds truly original, but something that is too original can never be an instant hit. The melodic and harmonic material of a successful pop song is already familiar the first time you hear it. It's like a cupcake. It's small, predictable in form, and calls attention to itself by its decoration (its lyrics), and perhaps a bit of surprise filling inside (which is also usually made of a rich and recognizable substance).

The performance of a pop song is tremendously important. All forms (or "covers") of Ben Folds' "The Luckiest" pale in comparison to his performance. If Bing Crosby hadn't recorded "Jim Hoyl's" song, it might have never become a hit (the Crosby recording is unfortunately not available on YouTube). Pop songs are almost always connected with a performer. In the case of Folds, the performer is the composer.

I got on this ramble after listening to a podcast on "The Story"," about a project called Eight in Eight where Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaman, and Damian Kulash set out to write and record eight songs in eight hours (they completed six songs in twelve hours). They wrote the lyrics for the songs with the help of their fans, who gave them ideas by way of twitter, but their clever lyricist did most of the actual writing work. The result is a bunch of songs with clever lyrics and melodies and harmonic progressions that I would consider (I didn't hear everything--only what was in the podcast) mainly derivative. Without the words I doubt I would be able to identify the music I heard as anything different from the scores of well-put-together pop songs (and I suppose I mean "indie" pop songs) from the first decade of the 21st century and the last years of the 20th. Still, these people are good musicians, and they have succeeded in doing what they set out to do.

I suppose that one difference between contemporary "pop" music and contemporary "classical" music, is that "classical" composers try to make music that is original from a melodic or harmonic perspective. Originality, when it comes to music, is, of course, a near impossibility, but "classical" composers fight the urge to do something that has been done before (at least I do), and pop music composers seem to embrace established traditions and flex their creative muscles by dressing their music up with their own "twists" (or decking them with attractive lyrical "frosting"). Originality in pop music does pop up now and again, but it doesn't seem to be the "rule." And there are also not-necessarily-original pop songs that I would consider excellent music.

Before there was pop music as we know it, what we call "classical" music followed formulas of the day. There are countless pieces of Renaissance "wallpaper" music that you have to wade through in order to get to something truly original (but it's always worth the wade). It's the same with Baroque music, only more so, because more of it was published. Originality in the Classical Period was proportionally scarce. Haydn and Mozart couldn't help being original, but perhaps their music was embraced by the larger world because of its quality, and not because of its originality. Perhaps it was with Beethoven and then with the rise of music criticism that originality began to be prized in "intellectual" circles. Some people "got" late Beethoven, and some people didn't.

This is just a ramble, and I'm sure I'm not saying anything new, so I'll stop now.

Memorable Musical Memoirs

In answer to a comment left by Caroline, I have compiled a "starter" list of musical memoirs that I can guarantee to be interesting and entertaining reading. Some of these books are no longer in print (but they are in libraries, and some are on line). I have limited my list to memoirs by well-known "classical" musicians (there is also one librettist), and I didn't include anything that I wouldn't recommend very highly. The listing is alphabetical to avoid any kind of "ranking."

Andre Benoist: The Accompanist
Feodor Chaliapin: An Autobiography as told to Maxim Gorky
Feodor Chaliapin: Man and Mask
Lorenzo Da Pointe: Memoir
Carl Flesch: Memoirs of Carl Flesch (edited by Max Rostal)
Gary Graffman: I Really Should be Practicing
Paul Hindemith: A Composer’s World *
Oscar Levant: Memoirs of an Amnesiac
Oscar Levant: A Smattering of Ignorance
Nathan Milstein: From Russia to the West
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions
Dmitri Shostakovich: Testimony
Nicholas Slonimsky: The First Hundred Years
Ethel Smyth: Impressions that Remained
Steven Staryk: Fiddling with Life
Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography
Joseph Szigeti: With Strings Attached
Henri Temianka: Facing the Music
Meredith Wilson: There I Stood With My Piccolo

* This is really more of a set of essays, but I feel that it belongs on this list.

The Frog Prince

Sometimes you can find a handsome prince in an unlikely place. The other day, while our son Ben was trying out banjos at Elderly Instruments up in East Lansing, Michigan, I had some time on my hands. They do not specialize in bowed stringed instruments, but they do have a small room filled with inexpensively-priced violins and violas. Some are pretty good, and some are not. I suppose as far as violins and violas go, they sell whatever people bring to them to sell on consignment.

They had a few bows, so I grabbed this one, and tried the fiddles. I fell in love with the bow. It is probably a hybrid. The person who made this frog in the 1920s probably didn't make the stick--particularly since the stick is stamped with a generic "Germany." The frog is stamped with the name of someone obscure: the only reference I could find for it on line was the listing for this bow.

Inspired by Bernie Zaslav's chapter on bows, I bought it. The price was about 1/6 what I would expect to pay for a bow that plays as well as this one. And I just couldn't bear the idea of anyone else using it but me.

The moral of the story? When looking for usable violins or bows, don't overlook highly-reputable guitar shops. This one even had a couple of violas and a violetta.

The Viola in My Life--in My Life

I spent the last couple of years helping Bernard Zaslav write The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody, and a copy of the book finally arrived in today's mail.

I have been a musical memoir junkie for most of my life, and a deep-seated goal of mine has always been to help someone write a memoir. Now I have done it, the book is in print, and everyone can enjoy Bernie's stories as much as I have enjoyed them. I feel very proud for having served as sometime editor and sometime muse for this project.

Bernie began his musical life as a violinist. Immediately after graduating from Juilliard, he made the permanent switch to viola when he got called to play in Raymond Scott's band for the summer. He studied viola for a year, and landed a job in the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell. Eventually he returned to New York, and after a nine-year hiatus (selling plumbing supplies!), he began playing in Broadway shows. In the late 1950s he began his career as the violist of a series of important American string quartets, including the Composers Quartet in New York (sort of a prototype for the Kronos Quartet), the Fine Arts Quartet, the Vermeer Quartet, and finally the Stanford String Quartet.

Bernie describes the personalities of many iconic musicians (mostly conductors, composers, pianists, and string players), and he also describes the personalities of the luthiers he knew in New York (he hung out at their 57th street shops between gigs). He gives the surprisingly entertaining details of his quest for the perfect instrument (which he finally found), and elaborates on his obsession with bow collecting. His "fermata" (he calls some of his digressions "fermatae") called "Fiddlesticks" (my personal subtitle is "confessions of a bow nut") makes for wonderful reading. In addition to collecting bows during his adventures and travels, Bernie collected lifelong friends (including me). His life as the middle voice of many string quartets has been full of all sorts of wonderful musical and personal joy, and I think this "view from the middle" will resonate with other people (like me) who love to play the viola in chamber ensembles and orchestras.

The book comes with two terrific CDs that are tucked into each of its covers. One has viola and piano music, and one has string chamber music. There is an excellent index, a thorough discography, and lots of pictures. You can get it from Amazon.

Summer Strings Concert

Susato Bass Dance


[Photos by Michael Leddy]

The Summer Strings concert last night had the usual chorus of insects, and the crickets were particularly active (it must have been in the upper 80s), but I did manage to get a recording. If you would like to hear more, please send me an e-mail and I will send you an invitation to the cloud (the dropbox folder) where the whole recording resides.

Toneballs on Display

What a treat it was to see this display on the wall of the lower level of Elderly Instruments in East Lansing, Michigan!



Notice that each toneball (they invented the term) is pinned and numbered:



And here's where each one comes from:



The article in The Fretboard describes the project, and it has far better photographs than my cell phone camera could take.

On Handwriting

"Penmanship is dancing; keyboarding is just walking fast."

This comes from my friend Joanna Key's post about handwriting.

Telemann Partitas (Kleine Kammermusik)

I found these wonderful pieces in the Petrucci Library that can be played by just about any treble clef instrument in C (violin, viola, soprano recorder, flute, or oboe) and continuo, and I thought I'd share them here because I have never encountered these pieces anywhere else. They are extremely interesting pieces that Telemann clearly wrote for the pleasure of musicians. They work perfectly well as two voice pieces (I like playing them as a soprano recorder and violin duet).

Ear-age

You're Old! Quit Being in Denial!

You probably thought you had better hearing?? You were wrong! The highest frequency you can hear is: 12khz

Check your hearing, download the Ultra Sonic Ringtones and hear it for yourself!

I have a slight headache after not hearing the frequencies above 12khz. I wonder if what you can't hear can hurt you?

All That Matters (really) is the Music

I am an extraordinarily lucky person because every Friday from 3:00 to 4:45 I have the opportunity to play Medieval and Renaissance music with a group of musicians who play recorders, crummhorns, and other buzzing instruments like racketts and cornamuses. I often play the viola d'amore in this ensemble, and I particularly enjoy it when I have the chance to play the bass parts. We play for the joy of playing great music, and every week we explore the inner and outer limits of the repertoire. My deepest wish is that somehow through playing this music some of its beauty might "rub off" on me.

Today, while we were playing some four-part "chestnuts," it occurred to me that there were a whole bunch of lousy things going on in the world during the decades when Josquin Des Pres and Heinrich Isaac were writing. In spite of political problems, wars, the Inquisition, and the outlandish practices of their employers, they still wrote beautiful and meaningful music.

For musicians all that really matters is the music--whatever music it happens to be. And when it is really great music, it can reach across centuries and into remote locations. Perhaps one of the purposes of writing music is to let other musicians know that music IS important, not that it once WAS important. Playing music allows music to BE.

It's easy to get swept up on the workings of politicians, particularly when it is on the computer, on the television, on the radio, and on everyone's mind. One thing I do know it is impossible to sway or influence politicians with the truth, reason, and the beauty found in Renaissance consort music, but it is possible for me to escape all that is not right in the world around me by surrounding myself with and participating in something that is so completely right. It serves as a kind of protection. It re-establishes my sense of sanity and balance. It makes the rest of the world seem less hostile and daunting.