Performance Practice

I really like the way the Zemlinsky Quartet plays this piece, but it disturbs me to see that every time the violist has a solo, he faces out to the audience. I don't know for sure if turning your head to the audience (and the requisite few inches that the viola's scroll faces them) increases the amount of sound you produce on the viola, but I sure find it a distraction to have choreography tell me where I should focus my attention.

But I suppose that this is 21st century performance practice, and we'll just have to live with it. Just like the stomping that some quartets do (and this quartet does only occasionally).

When Fluoristan is just too strong . . .

(Fluoristan was the original name for Crest!)

Read Jan van Steenbergen's scholarly article about the Schumann Brothers, Florestan and Eusebius (just for fun).

Steven Staryk's Violin Secrets Revealed!

Who wouldn't like to play the violin as well as Steven Staryk? The secret to great violin playing is, of course, practice. And lots of it. What you practice does make a difference, and Staryk has decided to share his particular and practical version of "what" on line.

Steven Staryk's 1975 collection of daily exercises, his "Daily Dozen," is now available as a free download from Cedar Coast Music. There's one for violists too--a straight transcription one fifth lower that is written in the alto clef.

I'm becoming a "pipa person"

I'm playing a concert that includes Tan Dun's Pipa Concerto, and until today's rehearsal, I really had no idea how totally cool an instrument the pipa is. None of the YouTube recordings of the Dun pick up all the pipa's nuances, but this Kronos video of the 1995 "Ghost Opera" (that shares some of the same material as the concerto) comes pretty close.



Here's the pipa in a more traditional setting:

Gender Equality and T-Shirt Size

I went online to order a T-shirt to support a cause I believe in strongly, and I couldn't help but noticing that there are sizes for "Women" and sizes for "Adults." Does that imply that the "Adults" are male? What does that imply about women? Hmmm . . .

I hope they fix this.

High Tech Notching: Notes from a Former Luddite

The act of practicing difficult passages hasn't really changed through the ages (at least through my ages), but the tools to do it have. Faced with the huge task of preparing a program of difficult music (in my case a program for violin and piano), I'm using every tool I can get my hands on.

This is one way I use Finale to my best advantage. I'm sure it will work with other notation software programs.

I enter the piano part of a difficult section into Finale, and set a very slow tempo. Then I copy the passage twenty times (or as many times as I want to repeat it), leaving a measure of rest and then of just the pulse (played on some high or low note that has nothing to do with the passage) between each repetition. Then I go in and set incrementally faster tempos for each repetition. After the masterpiece is completed, I export it as an audio file, load it into my ipod, and let the passage "practice me." It beats pure metronome notching because you don't have stop to move the metronome, and you get the harmony and counterpoint notched into your brain along with the passage in question.

String Bag "Life Hack"

I have been using string bags for my groceries for a couple of years now, and I always keep them in my shoulder bag. Sometimes they get tangled up in other stuff, which is why I invented this "life hack." I thought I'd share it here.

Two string bags:



Two string bags tangled in my shoulder bag:



I take an odd sock (who doesn't have one of these?) . . .



I put my hand in the sock . . .



and grab the handles of the string bags . . .



slipping the sock, pillowcase style, over the string bags.



La voila!



Then I put the stuffed sock it in my bag where it acts as a very light and non-bulky cushion for whatever else I have in there. No more tangles!



[Notice that I put the most attractive book in my library in the bag?]

Berlioz's orchestration of Schubert's Erlkönig!

Perhaps it is just a tad late for Halloween, but it's never too late for Schubert or for Anne Sofie von Otter! Berlioz's orchestration is mighty surreal.

Musical Success Story

This interview with Francisco J. Núñez from the NPR podcast The Story, tells a great story about the kind of musical success that really matters. Núñez was given a 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant for his work with the Young People's Chorus of New York City, a program that he created in order to get children from various neighborhoods in New York City to get together and make music. Listen below, then listen to the podcast!

Don Juan and the Jews of Spain

"Concealed in its puppet-theater plot is a Jewish joke: Don Juan exists to prove by construction that a devout Christian can be a sociopath, and by extension, that the Christian world can be ruled by sociopaths. The Enlightenment’s most insidious attack on Catholic faith, then, came not from atheists like Voltaire, but from a Spanish monk with buried Jewish sensibilities."

". . . [Don] Juan is not an archetype of legend: He is a metaphysical construct unique to his time, and to the tragedy of the Spanish Jews."

Go to Tablet Magazine and read this most interesting article about Mozart's Don Giovanni by David P. Goldman.

Variations on the Obvious?

I'm playing a concert tonight with a really wonderful program: Dohnanyi's "Variations on a Nursery Song," Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," and Elgar's "Enigma Variations." The Britten is, of course, not unrelated to the Elgar, but what I found going through my head between dreams last night was the concurrent juxtaposition of the theme that Dohnanyi uses and the variations of the Elgar. And then I realized that the "mystery" theme (one that everybody knows, yet nobody knows because it is absent) is the theme of the Dohnanyi. Pay special attention at the 3-minute mark of this video, and then consider the first Elgar Variation as a variation of this theme in the minor mode. The harmony is Elgar harmony, of course, and the relationship is obtuse, as the best variations on themes tend to be.

Maslow's World and How it Applies to Music

Would you believe that I just recently encountered the work of Abraham Maslow? As musicians we apply his "Four Stages of Competence" in everything we do. I know that I go through the path from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence with every piece I write, and if I'm lucky I make it from conscious incompetence to conscious competence with almost every piece I learn. If I'm lucky I make it all the way to unconscious competence. Sometimes I find myself going through the cycle many times with the same piece, if the piece is strong enough to take it. With a lot of music, like solo Bach, going through the cycle again and again is actually part of the fun.

Unconscious Incompetence

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

Conscious Incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

Conscious Competence

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.

Unconscious Competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

If you wade through all the primitive "pseudo-psychedelic" pop-ups on this page, you can read all of Maslow's Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences on line. Or you can just look at the Wikipedia summary. Perhaps what we are doing when we practice has something to do with trying to replicate the idea of a peak experience for ourselves (once we are able to get close to unconscious competence), and perhaps when we are performing our goal is to share that peak experience with others. Perhaps when we are writing music, our goal is to write stuff down that makes it possible for people to have and share peak experiences.

Must read articles about music copyright

Here's the first San Francisco Voice article, by Mark MacNamara, and here's the second.

Musical Cycles: An Optimistic Rant

People talk and write about how the development of writing as a way of communicating ideas caused a certain amount of skepticism and stress back in the Ancient world, particularly in Ancient Greece. It is kind of refreshing when you think about how much communicating with the written word--or written symbol--had been going on in the relative "neighborhood" of Greece before 370 B.C.E., and how little people like Socrates were able to know about it mainly because they didn't communicate in writing. Writing in Asia is even older.

Writing has going through various phases, has used different kinds of materials and machines, but people still find it worthwhile to communicate using written language.

This information helps me to feel a little bit better about where "we" are in the grand scheme of all things musical. Notation for music is far younger, as far as we know, than the notation systems used for representing words. There are a great many musicians who have no need for it, and even people who read music are sometimes crushed by its limitations. We have benefited from musicians who could use musical notation to full advantage and could give us great art, and recently, through the work of the volunteers participating in the IMSLP/Petrucci Library, we have been able to have a glimpse of just how many excellent composers wrote and published music during the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For a long time notation was the only way of recording musical ideas, but musical ideas could only be recorded by people who could use the system to their advantage. Musical ideas could only be recorded by people who had the inner tools and the discipline to take down their own "dictation."

After 1860, the year when people started making the first primitive recording devices, it became possible to record and reproduce musical ideas without having to translate them into notation. A mere 150 years later it is possible to record and transmit musical ideas across the world instantly without real-time sound production made by a physical friction-producing object (in the case of electronically-generated music).

In between these two technologies (1860-2011) we have, through around five generations of the technical approaches of playing and singing handed down from teacher to student, a world where many pieces of music that were once thought virtually unplayable can now be played by children. Thanks to the technological advances that have helped students learn (like electronic metronomes, phonograph records, CDs, tape recorders, video cameras, computers, PDF score libraries, and the communities fostered by musical bloggery), we probably have more excellent instrumental and vocal musicians per square mile than anyone could have dreamed possible in 1860. Musicians still make up a small percentage of the world's population, but there are enough of us (mostly concentrated in metropolitan areas) to supply live music everywhere it might be wanted.

We do, unfortunately, have to compete with music that comes from boxes, headphones, and screens, but I can imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when people might turn their backs on recorded music and seek out musical experiences that involve a live person or a group of living and breathing people playing music on instruments that generate their sounds as a result of friction rather than electricity. They might even pay for the privilege of listening. The closer virtual reality comes to the real thing, the more pronounced the differences become. And everyone reading this knows what those differences are.

Perhaps we're all participating in a large musical cycle, and due to the speeding up of progress that computers afford, we can kind of see part of the curve. Maybe we might even see a change soon. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm going to keep practicing, just in case an exciting change comes during my lifetime. I figure that at 52 I have about 40 good years left.

Lilia Skala

Last night Michael and I watched the film Roseland. He was interested in it because of Teresa Wright, but that was all he knew about the film. What a thrill it was to find the actress Lilia Skala, the actress who played the Mother Superior in Lilies of the Field, in the role of Rosa.

Now THIS is acting. Here's a clip from the film where the character of Rosa begins with an impression of Marlene Dietrich, and after a bit of Puccini, contemplates a proposal of marriage.

Encountering acting like this echoes the line that the character of Arthur, played by David Thomas, says at the end of this clip: ". . . but gee wiz, I know it when I see it. The real thing. When I see that, something in me goes "bang, bang" instantaneously. Never fails."



and here's another very short clip:



Acting like that does not come without brains. Skala was the first Austrian woman to get a degree in architecture. She had to go to Germany to get one because in the second decade of the 20th century Austria wouldn't accept women in the university (at least in technical fields).

Skala's granddaughter, who is also an actress, wrote and performed a one-woman show about her grandmother a couple of years ago, and Libby has generously put some clips from it on YouTube:

Slow Learner
Never in Love

Here's part one of a four-part interview with Libby about her grandmother.