Something Old, Something New

The musical world is kind of small. Seen through the lens of the internet it becomes big, and sometimes it becomes distorted.

I have refrained from making any sort of comment here on the situation at the New England Conservatory involving the firing of Ben Zander because Norman Lebrecht taken up that task, and he has done it rather well.

It is all very personal for me because I was a member of Ben Zander's Youth Orchestra (back when it was a Youth Chamber Orchestra). Back in 1974 it was in serious competition for string players with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, and the kinds of kids who opted to play in Ben's orchestra were exceptional in a kind of unusual way. The NEC Youth Chamber Orchestra had less prestige than GBYSO (which was, perhaps, why I had a shot at getting in), but that was only because it was new and small.

I remember, for example, Phoebe Carrai, who played with the Youth Chamber Orchestra even though she was a New England Conservatory student, because she enjoyed working with Ben Zander. She went on to do great and, at the time, unconventional things with music. When I first heard the group in 1973, the principal oboist was a Harvard freshman named Kip Wilkins. When I started playing with the orchestra, the principal oboist was Beth Orson, who drove to Boston from Providence, Rhode Island every Saturday.

Ben Zander took a chance on me, and he gave me the position of first flute during my last year of high school. In retrospect I think he took a chance on me because he knew my father, who was an NEC faculty member at the time. My friend (since childhood), Susanna Newton (now Susanna Hilliard) was the principal oboist after Beth, and Clelia Goldings was the principal bassoonist (notice that these people are all still in music?). We played, among other things, Beethoven's Second Symphony.

Perhaps it was my second year at Juilliard when I took the train to Philadelphia to visit Susanna. We went to a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, and had tickets in the balcony. Beethoven's Second Symphony, a piece we knew intimately, was on the program. Sitting side by side, as flutists and oboists are wont to do, we kind of giggled, thinking about our past experience with the piece relative to our position. We turned around, and who was sitting in the "bassoon" seat behind Susanna but Clelia Goldings, who was visiting Philadelphia from her school in Connecticut (Yale)! I kid you not.

After the concert Susanna and I listened to a tape of our Beethoven performance with Ben Zander, and we decided (in the most inflated of young adult mindsets) that our interpretation of the piece was superior to what we heard the Philadelphia Orchestra play that evening.

I played piccolo in Ben's Boston Philharmonic when I lived in Boston during the early 1980s (where I worked as a typist by day), and have enjoyed following his career as a motivational speaker and as a motivational writer. The adolescent in me still responds to Ben's unconventional way of letting people feel (sometimes even duping them) that they can live up to their potential and exceed their own expectations. Part of his technique for getting young people who want to play like professionals involves allowing the trajectory of a musical phrase to do the "heavy lifting." He likes to give people a sense of collective purpose as musicians, and relies a great deal on intuition. He lets down his inhibitions, and in exchange he expects musicians to let down their inhibitions (which seems like a fair trade). His is a kind of "seat of the pants" approach at times, but it works with young people. It works with musicians, and it seems to work for non musicians as well. Sure, Ben is a bit of a nut. But we're all a bunch of nuts when it comes to living the musical life.

Luckily Ben Zander is armed with a brother who is a lawyer, a brother-in-law who is a former Harvard University president, and legions (and now generations) of students who shared the formative experience that I had. It is clear to everybody who follows the story that his firing was an injustice at best, and, more likely, it was a personal vendetta. The people who suffer from this, and with most acted-out personal vendettas between and among adults in educational situations, are children.

John Simon on Nostalgia

I have been a long time reader of John Simon, and have admired his criticism for a long time, even when I don't agree with his views. Perhaps I admire him most when I don't agree with his views. It was intriguing to read his take on the film The Artist . He actually found the film "disgraceful," and dismissed it as a silly piece of nostalgia that is inferior in every way to the films it emulates. He doesn't like the fact that the film is in black and white, and he doesn't like the use of Herrmann's love theme Vertigo in the film.

It made me wonder if it's a generational thing. After all, if I want to see a great silent film, I could see Wings, that is if it EVER makes it to the top of our Netflix cue, where we have been waiting for it for well over a year. When people make nostalgic films about the 1970s, the decade when I came "of age," I always find false notes. The fashions of the 1970s were horrible. The fabrics were itchy, nobody understood how to make pants that could fit women's bodies, too many people took drugs, there was too much litter, and the air smelled horrible because of the lead in gasoline. The cars, for the most part, were ugly too. And the hair styles. There was terrible racism and terrible sexism. There was also terrible pretension in art and music. And in film, too.

The nostalgia for people who were coming of age during the 1970s was the culture of the 1950s, mostly as depicted by the television show Happy Days. I remember asking my aunt if it was fun growing up during the 1950s. She told me that it was very boring.

I can accept Simon's dismissal, and could add a criticism or two of my own to his list, but I fear that his fortissimo dislike of the film might have drowned out some of the film's special qualities.

I thought that the use of sound in the film was brilliant, particularly during the dream sequence. I thought that the film was a deliberate comic fantasy, just like most of Hazanavicius' other films (which Simon hasn't seen, but perhaps might enjoy). There is a fine line between nostalgia and parody, and I think Hazanavicius, his actors, his crew, and his properties people walk it gracefully. Hazanavicius evokes Herrmann in another film (one of his OSS-117 movies), and it is also quite appropriate. Herrmann represents a generation of excellent American or naturalized American composers who worked in the film industry and brought the quality of American music up to a world-class standard. One silent message (of this silent movie) is how important well-thought-out and well performed music is for the success of a film.

The musicians' union protested the use of recorded music in films because it would put musicians out of work (and it did, for the most part), but the Hollywood studios also set the standard for recorded film music to become an art form in itself. I believe that is one reason why Hazanavicius used the Vertigo music in this particular film that concerns this particular subject. We have no idea what the music played in theaters sounded like in America during the 1920s and how much or how little it did to enhance the films the musicians accompanied. We can imagine it to have been great, or, in some cases, and in some cities, and in some theaters, it could have been dreadful. It probably sounded better in Russia.

Most of all I'm sorry that Simon missed what I found to be the most poignant film reference of all: homage to the character of Flike in De Sica's 1951 film Umberto D..

More Seymour Barab on YouTube!

This part of his Suite for Trumpet, Alto Saxophone, and Piano.

Emanuel Vardi's 1981 Viola Recital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Many thanks to Bernie Zaslav for sending this link of Emanuel Vardi in what surely must have been his prime! The piece at the 42:56 mark is Seymour Barab's 2nd Viola Sonata. A person could learn a whole lot about viola playing (and string playing in general) from watching and listening to this guy play.

Seeing the world through a window rather than through mirror

"I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you."

Bill Withers

Until 90 minutes ago I had no idea who Bill Withers was. Michael got a documentary about him called Still Bill from Netflix, and I found it an unexpected treat to get to know the man who wrote so many of the songs that served as the unconscious audio backdrop of my youth (I never knew who wrote them or who was singing because I never "watched" music on television). Withers, who is now in his 70s, demonstrates in the most beautiful way what it is to be friend, what it is to be a father, what it is to be a mentor, and what it means to connect with people person to person and not "personage" to personage. He also defines in practice what it means to have musical talent, and what it means to live through music (as shown through an awe-inspiring recording session he has with Raúl Midón). I supposed you could say that it isn't the "kind" of music I spend my life doing, but it is a "way" of music that I admire greatly.

I feel very fortunate to have had the chance, through this film, to spend bit of time with Bill Withers.

1930s AF of M Campaign Against Canned Music in Theatres

The folks at Paleofuture have a very interesting post about using recorded music in movie theaters.

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition

Now here's a nifty idea! I'm excited to hear these audition videos and to see the way people respond to them. The restrictions and rules of the competition tell us a great deal about the musical world at large, including public domain issues (like circumstances surrounding the Strauss Horn Concerto). A close reading of the rules is an interesting experience. It seems that the people running this competition have made every allowance for this to be a fair competition. Here are the rules, and here is a video about the project.

Downshifting Made Easier

One of the most eye-opening and ear-opening things I learned from using my new dual-mirror method of practicing is the observation that I have a tendency to move my bow slightly away from the bridge (towards the fingerboard) when I downshift. This causes a bit of instability, which translates into a less-than-consistent sound.

My solution? Move the bow ever-so slightly towards the bridge during every downward shift.

The results are remarkable! Give it a try if you notice this tendency in your downshifting.

Seven Years!

Gosh. It's been seven years since I started this blog on February 7, 2005. How could that be?

I can hear it now . . .

I imagine that my students will ask me tomorrow if I noticed that the Super Bowl ads used classical music.

I am not a sports person, and I also know next to nothing about the game of football, but I did watch a bit of the Super Bowl yesterday, and I did shudder a little when I heard snippets from the Scherzo from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in an ad that had polar bears drinking coke. I groaned an "Oy." Then another polar bear ad used a rendered excerpt from the last movement. There was Rossini in the Doritos, and Strauss in the Camry. Every excerpt except the Glass (which does work well as background music for a commercial) was extremely familiar; the "stock" of ringtone-friendly themes. (I suppose we should give creative points to Coke for not using the first movement of the Fifth).

Excuse my curmudgeonly blurt.

These commercials use themes from pieces of music, not pieces in their entirety. It is kind of like suggesting that a line from a movie IS the movie, or, by extension, "the movies."

Don't get me started on the half-time show, or the apocalypse theme that seemed to permeate the commercials. Or the product placement of Twinkies in the end-of-the-world ad for some kind of car that was not a Ford.

Recently Updated: The Real Bambino

After seeing OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies last night, I was able to trace the origins of the song sung by Jean Dujardin, the star of The Artist. You can teleport to the updated post here.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

For the longest time I practiced with these two mirrors on adjacent walls, but it wasn't until I actually hung up the mirror on the right (rendering it useless for anything but practicing), and turned my chair and stand at an angle so that I can see both images without the music stand getting in the way (why did it take me so long to figure this out?), I never reaped the huge benefits of being able to see what is happening on both sides of the instrument (in real time) while I am practicing.


One of the benefits of teaching is seeing the incredible difference it makes to the sound when something a student does looks right (a hand position, a bow hold, the place of the bow on the string, the direction and speed of the bow stroke). This configuration allows me to see the right side of my instrument when I am in upper positions (in the left mirror my hand is always in the way), see my vibrato, watch my shifts, notice when a lower string is being pulled rather than being cleanly stopped, see bow changes, and see the lapses from "ideal" that I miss every so often. Much more often, it seems, than I had imagined. It helps me to be a better teacher to myself.

Here is the operative geometry: both mirrors are a the height where I can see my whole playing mechanism while sitting down, which is what works for my particular corner because of the windows. The larger mirror is on the right, and it is 23" wide (minus the frame). The smaller mirror on the left has 19.5" of mirror (minus the frame). The distance from the corner of the room to the 2.5" frame of the right mirror is 28.5", and the distance from the corner to the 2" frame of the left mirror is 45.5 inches.

Here's a drawing of the missing violist (made by our son Ben during a concert I played in February of 1999). He was nine at the time. I was 39.

Ira Glass Interviews His Cousin Philip

This interview on today's Fresh Air (it was actually recorded in 1999) threw me for a loop. Here's a section where Philip Glass (who celebrates his 75th birthday today) talks about studying with Nadia Boulanger:

GLASS: You know, I find, I tell you, I'd finally after I'd been there about two years I finally figured out why I was there. We were having a lesson and I had come in with my harmony. We came to a place in the music and she said, it's wrong here. And I said, Madame Boulanger, it's correct. I cited the rules of voice leading and said that all these things are correct and there's nothing wrong with this. And she said yes, she said, but if Mozart had done it he would have done it like this. And she plays it the correct version, which was that perhaps the soprano was in the - the third was in the soprano instead of the root of the chord was in - whatever I had done I'd done it wrong. And I looked at her and I said but look, the rules are right here. And she said yes, but it's still wrong. I was astonished. And I - it was at that moment that I understood what she was teaching me. I realized that she was teaching the relationship between technique and style.

For example, now let's put the question another way. If you listen to let's say a measure of Rachmaninoff and then a measure of Bach, you know which is which without, you know immediately. And the question is well, why do you know that? They both are following basically the same rules of harmonic, of voice leading. But what happens is that you have in your, the course of your listening, you have taught yourself - you've recognized that Rachmaninoff will always solve a certain problem in a certain way. You may not say that to yourself, but your ear will tell you that. And that Bach will do it in his way. And you say, oh, that sounds like Bach or that sounds like Rachmaninoff or that sounds like Stravinsky. And what you're hearing is let's put it this way: You're hearing the predilection of the composer to resolve a technical problem in a highly personal way.

So in other words, now let's...

GLASS: And from that point, how hard is it to design your own personal way to solve it?

GLASS: Well, this is the point. The point is - and this is the other thing which she didn't say in words that day, but which I understood totally, was that in order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique.

You have to have a place to make the choices from.

GLASS: Yeah.

GLASS: If you don't have a basis on which to make to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all, you have a series of accidents.

GLASS: Looking at your career from the outside, one of the things that's striking is the number of different collaborators that you've worked with and I wonder if part of it is because you had the seminal experience of confronting somebody else's work.

GLASS: Well, that's exactly - that's exactly what happens when you find your place, yourself in a place of total ignorance of that kind. And that's the place where you can begin again, you can begin learning again. You know, the difficulty with any - well, it's not just artists or musicians but with anybody in any ordinary part of life - walk of life - the difficulty we have is how we continue to learn.

I mean, this is - everybody has this problem. Because you get what we call our training and education to a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing gears in the same way. And the biggest - this is particularly true of composers, they pick up a style or way of working a certain way, but the real issue, I've always said to younger composers, it's not how do you find your voice but how to get rid of it.

Getting the voice isn't hard, it's getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you've got the voice then you're kind of stuck with it.

GLASS: You've said to Terry Gross - in fact, she's asked you - do you ever try to compose so it doesn't sound like Philip Glass?

GLASS: I do it all the time and I fail all the time.

You can listen to the interview (or read a transcript of it) here.

Dancing about Architecture

There is a bit of tizz concerning Jonathan Biss's piece in the Guardian concerning how difficult it is to write about music. Biss's article is difficult to read, and I imagine that is E-Book about Beethoven is equally difficult to read. It is probably as difficult to read as it was for him to write.

The problem with writing about music is that our relationships change with pieces of music as we grow and change. A piece of music is not a static thing. In order to live it must be interpreted, and that interpretation, if it is successful, grabs our attention and inspires us to follow new ways of hearing a piece of music. It is difficult to hold onto a feeling, and it is difficult to name it adequately. Casting the "feel" of a moment is very hard to do in retrospect, because that feeling immediately becomes only a memory of a feeling.

Writing music can have the same issues. A phrase comes into your head. You write it down, struggling to make sure that all the rhythms are just as you thought of it. Later you play the phrase on the piano, and it's totally unremarkable. Then you try it on another instrument or in another register, and it sounds better. You bat it around, change it, give it harmony (change that harmony), and write it down anew. Perhaps it is something worth keeping, so you stash it away somewhere and hope that you can use it.

For some people this is a kind of torture. Other people find it fun. I find it fun. I also find it fun to write about music. I would rather write about music than just about anything. I find that the best way to really learn something about a piece of music is through writing about it. (I also find that the best way to understand a poem is by setting it to music.) It doesn't matter if an observation is "right" or "wrong," and it doesn't matter if by learning something new I invalidate a hunch I had before. I enjoy correcting myself. In my world being "right" is not the only way to interpret a piece of music.

I am in the fortunate position of not being an authority figure, and of not having anything to protect. I go with my carefully-thought-out hunches and take all sorts of risks by voicing ideas that I know nobody has thought of before (or at least written about) to my students, friends, and colleagues (and driving my family crazy). I do it when I write program notes, I do it when I write reviews, and I do it when I write blog posts. I don't have to worry about protecting my "image" in the musical world. I do not have an important position or a solo career. What you see is what you get with the music I write (there are no secrets except for the vast mysteries of music itself), and I take it upon myself to be honest when I write reviews.

When I was Jonathan Biss's age (he's 32) I was a very different person from the person I am today. I worked at a radio station, and had what some would consider an encyclopedic knowledge of music from all the liner notes I had read, but I had only really experienced music from the standpoint of a wind player who always played the upper voice in an ensemble. I mainly listened from the top down, and managed to miss a huge amount when I listened to music. I was an avid reader of reviews, but I had never written one. I knew a lot about baroque music and 20th-century music, but didn't really know much about classical forms because studying them had little to do with the music I played (the flute repertoire). In other words, I thought I knew something, but I really knew very little.

My real education began when I became a string player. Then everything changed. Now I hear everything differently, and I think very differently about everything I play. Every experience is a new experience.

Perhaps Jonathan Biss will, at some point, have the opportunity to step outside his position in the musical world, and maybe then it might be easier for him to write about music. If he still wants to.

Jean Dujardin (the silent star of The Artist) Sings

Yesterday Michael and I saw The Artist. I can't recommend a better way of spending an afternoon or an evening. It is a particularly moving experience to see it in a theater. Don't wait until it comes out in DVD, unless you have to.

While looking around the internets for stuff about Ludovic Bource, the film's composer, I found this nifty clip from OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, which is another collaboration (2006) between Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicius, Bérénice Bejo, and the composer Ludovic Bource. Sure, the instrumental playing is faked, but the spirit is wonderful.

UPDATE: I saw OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies last night, and learned that the music for the above link was not by Bource! It is an Arabic version of "Bambino," a Neopolitan song that was made popular in France in 1956 by the pop singer Dalida:



The original Neopolitan song, called "Guaglione" doesn't have the words "bambino." It was written by Giuseppe Fanciulli (the pseudonym of Mastro Sapone, who lived from 1881-1951), with words by Nicola "Nisa" Salerno.


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Here's the trailer for The Artist: