Letters of Note

Let's help Shaun Usher out. He noticed that most of the letters on his excellent Letters of Note blog are written by men. I'm sure that people who read this blog could give him a few suggestions (and they don't need to be specific references to letters, and they don't need to be things that are already on line). I certainly plan to.

Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

I used to credit many of the major events in my life to having been in a certain place at a certain time, which turned out to have been the right time. I remember one particular night in Interlaken, Massachusetts (just down the road from Stockbridge, and during a Tanglewood summer). My flute teacher, Paul Fried (who was then a member of the Boston Symphony) played a recital; and during the recital the mosquitoes in the hall were having a feast on the audience and on the musicians. I particularly remember the heroic way Paul played the Allegro movement of the C-major Bach Sonata while a mosquito was feasting on the spot between his eyes and the bridge of his nose. I saw a hungry mosquito biting the arm of the woman sitting next to me. I slapped it. We became friends. A few years later she married my father.

Another one of Paul's students was at the concert, and during the intermission we got to talking about flutes. I had just put in an order for a Powell flute, and had been told that it would take four years before my instrument would be made. This woman just happened to have a Powell order that was coming due in a month or two, and during her waiting period she had bought a Haynes flute, and had no use for her Powell order. She turned her number over to me. That Powell number happened to be adjacent to the Powell number that my closest hometown friend (now, as then, the highly accomplished extremely beautiful Elizabeth Mann) had. We both thought this was pretty cool, though she did have to wait her four years (and I had only been playing for one or two years by the time I got my Powell).

Another lucky moment happened in Hong Kong at the home of Klaus Heymann (who would later found Naxos). It was some German-related cultural activity, and featured an Austrian percussionist giving some kind of a talk. My temporary work visa had run out (and my money had too), and I was hoping to find some kind of employment somehow. I thought that my German skills (which were quite good at the time, since I had been living in Austria) might help me, since my musical ones had run their course, and I thought I might meet somebody there.

I happened to meet Keith Anderson, who was the music critic for the South China Morning Post, and he happened to have a friend who happened to have a job teaching music in a school. This friend happened to go into labor prematurely, and the school needed a music teacher right away. I began teaching (even though I had never taught general music before) a day or two later. The money I made from filling in that maternity leave was enough for me to fly back to America.

Stuff like this used to happen to me regularly when I was a city dweller.

I am no longer a city dweller, and have now spent the bulk of my life as a small-midwestern-town dweller. This kind of thing never happens any more. When I visit New York, I feel the kind of energy I used to feel, but there is little in the way of the kind of surprise encounters I used to have.

Now what happens seems almost to be the reverse. I have accomplished everything through slogging it out the long way. Years of hard work have turned me into a string player and into a composer, and the only true serendipity I have experienced of late concerns putting together elements from the past. A good example is when I found out out that two of my closest older friends (Seymour Barab and Bernie Zaslav) played in a string quartet together more than 50 years ago (I am very proud to be the conduit that got them back in touch).

When Michael and I moved to our little town it was a very musically-friendly place. I found all things could be possible, and with time, they have, even though the town has changed a great deal, and many of the original musicians have left. Still, I am able to play regularly in a string quartet, a duo with a pianist (and sometimes a trio, adding one of the members of our quartet), a Medieval and Renaissance group, a couple of excellent professional orchestras in a neighboring city, and a summer string orchestra (a teaching orchestra, really) that has ended up (we just finished our seventh summer) being an extremely enriching experience for everyone involved.

Sometimes I miss the possibility of surprise opportunities happening at any given gathering of musicians, but I know that musical satisfaction and musical growth is something that comes from (figuratively, of course) planting stuff yourself, watching it grow, and then feeding it to people.

Welcome Back Marty!

My old friend Martin Perry is back in the musical blogosphere in full force!

[Photo by Monsieurlui]

Marcia Van Dyke

Until I saw (last night) it for the first time since childhood (and the first time in color), I didn't realize that In The Good Old Summertime, the 1949 remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 The Shop Around the Corner (both are based on a play about a perfume store written by Miklos Laszlo, which also seriously influenced Nora Ephron's 1998 You've Got Mail) was such a violin movie. Marcia Van Dyke, who plays a mean "Souvenir de Moscow" near the end of the movie, led a double life as Hollywood star and as a member of the San Francisco Symphony.

Louise Parkson, Marcia Van Dyke's character, is a violinist who is valued in the course of the film for her excellent playing rather than simply for her physical beauty.

You can read a brief article about her in the January 19, 1948 issue of Life

Musical Fun Dictating to the Mountain Lion

I spent a far larger chunk of time that I planned to updating my Mac to the new Mountain Lion operating system (four hours to get it on my computer--including waiting time--and another two hours installing it and getting updates for it). This morning I have been having some fun with the new dictation feature in Pages. I did what any musician would do: I spoke in various languages and with different accents, and then I played into it.

Here is what the program made of my instrumental croonings:

Who is who
Hello hello and hello
Are are are boo-boo boo-boo boo hello
Are you doing boo-boo or or and or add who
Or or or or woo hoo
Are are are are
On or or add
Are are are are are are are are
Hello Bobo www.and I'll come.com

Are are are are are
Or add her or add her her mad mad mad
Are are are are are
Are are are are on ha ha

Are all all all her her
Are are are are are are
Woo hoo or or
Are are are are are are
Bird or or or or you

[The first stanza comes from sounds made on my viola, the second stanza is from the sopranino recorder, and the third comes from sounds I made on the alto recorder.]

I think I'll do something productive now.

Spoils of a Summer Night

Last night we had our 2012 Summer Strings concert in Charleston, Illinois, and below you will hear an arrangement I made of a couple of Hungarian Folk Songs that TOTALLY SURPRISED ME when I found them in an old anthology of Hungarian folk songs. Perhaps Brahms used the same anthology for some of his Hungarian Dances. Who knows?



The songs are "Csillag eleg ragyog az egen" (The Sky Glows a Thousand Stars), and "Csicseri borso" (Oh you my child).

Musical Thought for the Day

I have been reading The Violinist's Thumb And Other Lost Tales Of Love, War, And Genius, As Written By Our Genetic Code, and got inspired by Sam Kean's discussion of Toxo, the Machiavellian microbe, not to mention "Mussorgsky's Song of the Flea" (actually called "Mephistopheles' Song in Auerbach's Tavern"). And then there's this one.

Here's a translation of the original from Gothe's Faust:

Once upon a time lived a king
Who owned a handsome flea….
....a flea, hahahahaha .....a flea.

He cherished him and loved him
As though a son were he…
A flea, hahahahaha ...a flea ha etc….a flea…

He called the royal tailor
Who toiled for days and nights
To make the flea a doublet
And fancy purple tights.
….purple tights.

A flea hahahaetc

Our flea is dressed in velvet
And silks of golden hue
A ribbon o'er his shoulder
A jewelled order too...
...a flea! hahahaha...a flea!

A minister they made him
A diamond star he wore
And all his poor relations
Got orders galore...

The courtiers, male and female,
They were no longer gay.
The queen and all her ladies
Were pestered night and day, ha ha!

To scratch they were forbidden,
They had to bear the prick.
But we, when we are bitten
Know how to scratch... and kick!
Hahahaha etc

Fun With Russian

Learning Russian is not easy, but I am having a lot of fun trying, alternating between youtube tutorials and a couple of textbooks. It is especially fun when textbook writers choose amusing inadvertent phrases to explain things like vowel reduction. I find that sounding out words in Russian is a little bit like "sounding out" music--perhaps a little bit like playing a familiar piece on a new instrument or in a new clef.

My favorite phrase so far comes from The Everything Learning Russian Book by Julia Stakhnevich:

Сумасшедший Вегетарианская

Something which I, of course, am (a crazy vegetarian).

Olympic Fever and the Power of Music

Yes. I have Olympic Fever.

I watched the opening ceremonies, and truly enjoyed listening to the children's choirs from all the British Isles (especially the choirs from Scotland and Wales) and the mixture of Shakespeare and Elgar ("Nimrod" and The Tempest). I enjoyed the spectacle of the first part of the history of Great Britain (or England, or the British Isles, or the United Kingdom), but I merely endured the blue-hued and overly-long salute to British pop music. Paul McCartney's performance of "Hey Jude," however, was remarkable.

People from (nearly) every country of the world speaking (nearly) every language of the world, encouraged by McCartney, sang the chorus together in full voice. The range is small, it is a repeating motive that spells out a major triad with a nifty ninth that resolves to the tonic (twice!), and then steps down to the fifth degree of the scale. It can go on forever, and the process of escaping the envelope of the octave has meaning every time.

And then McCartney did a "Pete Seeger": he had the audience sing without him. First the men, and then the women. Then he had them sing all together.

All of these athletes who are in London with one purpose in mind (to be the best they can be at the thing that they have given every day of their young lives to do), who will compete with one another with all they have, and who, in many cases, may not be able to communicate with one another through language, were able to communicate by singing the chorus of "Hey Jude" with all of their hearts. And they could sing it with all of the people who were in London to watch them do what they do better (faster, higher, and with more twists and turns) than anyone else in the world.

Such is the power of music.

Eine Kleine Medicine Musik (Old Crow Medicine Show, That Is)

Michael and I learn a lot from our kids. We made this video together last night.

"Being" an Anything, Particularly a Composer

Sometimes I wonder what "being" a composer is. I only really feel like one when I am writing, and when I am writing something that seems like the "same old, same old," I feel like either a lousy composer or not a composer at all. Stuff I have written (and there's a lot of it since I pretty much chain-wrote my way through my 40s) is written, and, like most music that hasn't been somehow "branded," it sits around dormant and silent. Once in a while I hear from somebody who has enjoyed playing something I wrote, and it feels pretty nice, but it is difficult to feel current about something that I did to the best of my ability a while ago, particularly when I spend a lot of my music writing time trying like hell not to inadvertently repeat myself.

Visual artists have it easy, perhaps. Take Cezanne, for example. He could paint fruit bowl after fruit bowl, and each one could be an original and meaningful piece of art that says essentially one thing: I am an example of the way Cezanne saw a bowl of fruit. We can enjoy any one of these Cezanne bowls of fruit at any time of year, and these bowl of never-decaying fruit can be found in multiple locations around the world. We can even enjoy them as reproductions, and (as evidenced above) in "collections" on the internet. We can enjoy them for their colors, for their composition, for their quality, for their Cezanne-ness, for their value in the art market, and for their influence on other artists and on art in general. And each one is a masterpiece.

Music, being not a "thing" exists mainly in time, but it does paint figurative pictures and does take up figurative space. Really great music written by really great composers (Haydn and Bach come immediately to mind, but there are scads and scads of others) is like the fresh new air of morning, piece after piece. I wonder if either Haydn or Bach felt like Cezanne did (hundreds of years later) while painting fresh pictures of fruit. I also wonder if either Bach or Haydn ever felt a little like the way I feel right now, which is in a state of creative defeat, or as (the character) Molly Dodd demonstrated when she (in the context of an episode of "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd") hosted the David Letterman show declared "our fields are fallow."

Я люблю музыку

Yup. I'm learning Russian.

Someone Like Somebody That I Used To Know

Rachel and Ben are both home for the week, and they brought the two most popular current songs on the radio and sang them at the same time.

Catherine II: Opera Librettist

The plot thickens.

Perhaps it's time to learn a little Russian.

I found a score for The Early Reign of Oleg, an opera by Vasily Pashkevich, along with Carlo Canobbio and Giuseppe Sarti, with a libretto by Catherine II.

[Sarti's name might ring a bell because Mozart quoted an aria from one of his operas (and identified his quotation) during the last act of Don Giovanni.]

Catherine must have had a serious change of heart concerning music (which she hated when she was young). She wrote eight more libretti, and founded the Imperial Opera and Ballet in St. Petersburg in 1783.

Why does this kind of thing NOT SEEM TO MATTER to regular historians? All Robert Massie seems to care about is intrigue, war, politics, and sex. Doesn't the fact that a woman with the mind of Catherine II might have had a lively musical court and a lively creative inner life? When he writes about Frederick the Great he mentions nothing special about the king's musical life.

Perhaps it's time for me to learn a lot of Russian.

Imperial Frustrations

I have been spending a lot of figurative time in the Russian Imperial Court of late. The interpersonal and political maneuvers of the "players" are fascinating, but I find it odder and odder that there is so little scholarship about music in the court. What I have found (and anyone who reads this blog knows that all roads lead to my fascination with Anton Ferdinand Titz) is either veiled (manuscripts that exist in only a few libraries) or simply wrong.

Take, for example, the 1708 Stradivarius known as the "Empress of Russia." This list, taken from the Cozio listing, shows the owners of the instrument.

There were two Empresses of Russia: Elizabeth (reigned from 1741-1762), the daughter of Peter I and aunt of Peter III, and Catherine II, who married Elizabeth's nephew, and became Empress in 1762 and reigned until 1796).

Pavel Berman has this bit of information on his website:

The violin takes it name from the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I of Russia who took power in 1741 in a military coup after a period of obscurity under the regency of Anna Leopoldovna, and was crowned the following year. Although herself not highly educated she inaugurated a period of cultural development, abolishing the death penalty in 1744, founding the University of St. Petersburg, and bringing the first Italian musicians to Russia, including the Neapolitan Francesco Araia who wrote the first true opera sung in Russian, Cephalus and Procris. The Empress gave this valuable violin to her secretary and lover, Gribersky. The instrument, also known as ‘Empress of Russia’ is from a private collection and is not normally played in public.

Who is Gribersky? According to Robert Massie (who I believe is well informed), Elizabeth did have a musical lover named Alexey Razumovsky. He played the bandura. Alexey Razumovsky's nephew Andrey, by the way, was the "Razumovsky" who commissioned Beethoven's Opus 59 Quartets. Maybe Alexey didn't do so well with the fiddle.

The Cozio list has Catherine II as the next owner of the instrument. Perhaps Elizabeth gave it to Catherine to give to her husband Peter, who was a violinist (and according to Catherine, who had no ear for music, a bad one). Maybe this was the instrument that Peter played. Who knows? Maybe Elizabeth gave it to Catherine to keep for Paul, Catherine's son and the person Elizabeth considered next in line for the throne after Peter. Paul, by the way, was the person who commissioned Haydn to write his Opus 33 Quartets. Paul studied violin with Titz.

I hope that someone reading this post might know more about music in imperial Russia than I do! Please contribute anything you can.