Metaphor or Not?

This is not to say that the game is unfair (although sometimes it does feel like it), but the clever enemy design adds a significant flair to otherwise normal cannon fodder. Some enemies will automatically be associated with trouble, for example large enemy ships that explode once they’re destroyed. You will be hard pressed to find an area where you can destroy them without getting wiped out yourself, while fighting waves of enemies. Enemy design is definitely one of Symphony’s strong points.

I really can't tell.

Read this and see for yourself.

Learning Styles II: Musing on Memory and Memorizing

I have a very poor memory. When I was a child I found spelling to be very difficult (I still do). In order to spell a few problematic words I had to figure out rhythmic patterns, which I still remember.

FI-FI-ELD (Mrs. Fifield, my second grade teacher)
CO-CH-IT-UA-TE (the name of the street where I lived)

Using musical tools to remember non musical things (and rhythmic patterns are musical tools) is really helpful, particularly for the musically inclined, but I have always had a problem with using non-musical tools to remember things musical. The only thing that has ever worked for me (and this is not advice because I have a very poor musical memory) has been purely kinesthetic memory, sometimes called "muscle memory," and, to a lesser extent, visual memory.

My weaknesses with musical memory used to be a problem for me, but now that I understand my strengths, I don't fret about it. Here's why:

1. Every musical experience is a new one for me. I cannot replicate the "way" I play a phrase intentionally, nor would I want to. Each subsequent movement of a Bach Suite or a Sonata or Partitia is a new treat, even though I have gone through the cycle of playing one a day (I'm a violist, so I can play both sets) for years.

2. Because I'm not relying on memory when playing with other people, I can allow my mind to expand and hear more of a whole musical picture. With every individual musical experience I have, the whole can sound completely different. And it often does (thank goodness).

3. Now that I am a fully-fledged adult, I never find myself in a position where I must play without music in front of me, unless, of course, I'm improvising or playing by ear.

I can recall only a couple of times when I was called upon to play from memory. Julius Baker had us memorize his set of warm-up pieces: Bach Allegro from the C-major Sonata, the flute solo from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the flute solo from Carnival of the Animals, and some scale patterns from Taffanel and Gaubert. Memorizing those passages meant that I could play them any time without thinking about much of anything. I learned those things kinesthetically and mindlessly, and could still, if handed a flute, play them kinesthetically and mindlessly (though my muscles would probably hurt a bit afterwards).

I have since learned that context is everything. Understanding the context of something is far better than being able to do the thing independently of its context. I am very good, for example, at playing scales and arpeggios in every key on the violin and the viola because I practice them in every key. But when I am confronted with a scale, arpeggio, or double-stop passage in a piece of music, that passage has an entirely different meaning and purpose than it had in my Flesch, Sevick, or Dounis books. I have to practice it in its own context in order for it to "work."

I have come to the realization that practicing scales, arpeggios, and double stops by themselves is great for building strength and to a certain extent for improving intonation, but in a harmonic context that is different from the one set up in the scale book (where you "live" in a key for a while, or you modulate to it from an expected harmonic place), a scale or an arpeggio or a series of double stops can be an entirely new experience. Also, in order to keep music interesting for all involved, I believe that everything should feel like an entirely new experience (even if it isn't really). Sometimes that can really mess you up when you have to "produce" in a high-pressure situation while playing from memory.

In 1980 I participated in an international flute competition in Budapest. Everything had to be memorized, so, for the first time in my life I had to perform from memory. I was young and ambitious, and I prepared as well as possible. It was a wonderful experience to be in a new country, eat new food, hear an odd language, and meet new people. I happened to meet a harpsichordist who wanted to talk with me about new ways of thinking about Baroque music, as well as the ways of the West. From him I learned that some the Bach Flute Sonatas were really Italian in style (something they didn't teach us at Juilliard), and that there was a tradition of playing Italian music that was really nifty when "applied" to Bach. I also met an Italian flutist who played in what I could identify as truly Italian manner, and suddenly I found myself re-thinking everything I was doing with the E-major Sonata I was playing.

I'm not sure what it was that came out when it was my turn to play, but it clearly did not impress the judges as a well-thought-out performance. I didn't advance beyond the first round. Had I been playing from music, I probably would have had a chance to consider what I had learned by using visual cues, but since I was relying on rote memory (the only kind I knew), I didn't have ample time or brain space to "re-learn" something that ended up being a musical revelation to me. I still enjoy that revelation.

I applaud people who can play from memory and learn new things at the same time, and I am totally impressed with people (particularly pianists) who can play in such a way that they totally forget about the notes and even the instrument they are playing, and can still make each musical utterance a new experience. I have come to accept that I am not one of them, and will never be. I have also come to accept the fact that its just fine to contribute what I can to the world of music in the ways I can.

Different Learning Styles

Here are a some words of wisdom (from other people) to help start the school year off right.

What you learn fast, you forget fast. [attributed to Jascha Heifetz.]

If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly. [attributed to Itzhak Perlman.]

The Power of Music

Kenneth Goodenough put this video in a comment on yesterday's post. It brought tears to my eyes, so I thought I'd liberate it from the comments and put it out front and center. Thank you for sending this, Kenneth.

To This We've (or I've) Come: Longing for Better Times

Almost 100 years ago music played a civilizing role in the most uncivilized of circumstances.

Lemons for Sale

If You Have A Lemon, Make A Lemonade. That is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he finds that life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: "I'm beaten. It is fate. I haven't got a chance." Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of self pity. But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: "What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?

This comes from Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, a book that I fear has run its course. Its wisdom, which actually used to inspire me, is not applicable in the shared set of private realities that have taken over the way we share news, information, and humor, and the way we do business. It certainly has no applicability in the current world of live (or even recorded) music of the "longhair" variety.

I used to be generally optimistic. I would always look on the positive side of every issue, and would try to consider changes that happened that were beyond my control as opportunities.

Opportunity has never really "knocked" for me. I have always had to do the "knocking." I have put tremendous effort into trying to make a life for myself in an area where very few people care about the things that I do, but as people leave the area (some move away and others die), I spend much of my energy simply partaking in activities for my own amusement, which sometimes pays off (if I'm lucky) in the act of amusing a handful of other people as well. But what I do no longer matters to most people, and it is clear that in my neck of the woods it never will.

The music classes for the upcoming semester (which begins next week) at the community college where I teach are seriously underpopulated. Teaching music appreciate classes used to be "lemonade," but I'm afraid that the young people who go to community college are not terribly interested in drinking the stuff I brew. (Remember that I identify myself mainly as a composer and secondarily as a string player. Teaching music appreciation as an underpaid adjunct instructor is the best I can do professionally in the area where I happen to live.)

That leaves the internet, I suppose: my "window to the world," where I feel I am being "marketed to" far too often.

I made the mistake of reactivating my Facebook account about a month ago, and have found the experience almost as unhealthy for me as I found it the first time. It is not for me. I just don't do superficial communication very well, and it pains me greatly to see friends from my past who don't seem to want to communicate with me directly. (Is it something I might have said? Or has it just been too long?)

I also don't do one-way communication very well, but I feel like the people who read this blog respond to what I write, even if they don't comment or send me e-mail messages. It is a safe space for me, and I hope it is for you as well.

Now that I have deactivated my Facebook account, and have done away with the problems that "window" caused for my state of mind, I think about what I could do for gainful employment if the "lemonade" of teaching music appreciation runs out.

For gainful employment I could "monetize" my blog. The very idea of this makes my stomach turn.

For gainful employment I could make my own publishing company and "market" my music to under-employed musicians who probably wouldn't buy what I would hypothetically have to sell, anyway. Even though I appreciate the honor or being offered commissions, writing music is not about making money for me. Its about making music. Still, when someone asks for something, what comes out is generally of higher quality than what comes out when I write for a hypothetical person.

For gainful employment I play string quartet weddings and orchestral concerts. They make me feel that there still may be a place for music in the grand scheme of things, but wedding season is pretty much over, and the orchestral season has not yet started.

Is it any wonder that I feel at loose ends?

Being a Lousy Student

I was a lousy student in high school. Sure, I was pretty good in the subjects that I cared about (history and music theory), but the subjects that didn't interest me remain a blur. I went to an excellent high school, and I got away with lousy studenthood because my teachers saw me as being on a path that had nothing to do with academics. I am particularly embarrassed about an English class I took my sophomore year (for us high school began in the tenth grade). We were supposed to have read Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and somehow I managed to pass the class without reading it at all. I can't remember what else I didn't read that year, but I know that I didn't fail the class.

What I do remember was that the teacher was also the German teacher, and I kind of wished I could take German, but after being such a lousy student in his English class, I didn't think it was a good idea. All I remember doing during English class was writing duets with my percussionist friend, who was also in the class. He would write a percussion part, and I would write a flute part, and then we would pass our completed half-duets to one another, and finish our little masterpieces (if the teacher thought that we were passing notes, he would actually have been correct). After class we would play them through. I can't remember if they were any good, but I imagine they must have been kind of similar to the Ingolf Dahl duet we spent much of the year practicing together.

Several years after graduating high school (a year early--how I managed to do that is still a mystery), I ran into that teacher (I'm not naming names) on the trolley in Boston (the "T" to all you youngsters and non-old-time-Bostonians), and told him that I graduated from Juilliard and could now speak German. He seemed unimpressed. My memory of him as a cold and detached person was unchanged, but perhaps his memory of me as a lousy student who only cared about music was also unchanged.

Perhaps I should give Tess of the d'Urbervilles a try.

. . . ain't you got no romance?

Don't you just love Larry's square violin (which he really plays)? Like many Fines, related or not related to me (Larry Fine is unfortunately not related to me), Larry has the fiddle gene.

Oh yes. Then there's the name of the woman they are serenading . . .

Curiouser and Curiouser

Perhaps the problem with curiosity is that every time we find out something new (perhaps I should drop the "we" and speak for myself), er, I find out something new, it throws a wrench into everything that I thought was so. Every chronology, whether personal or historical, is subject to interpretation, and a new twist or insight can alter the map significantly.

Take the Classical Period. There's a hell of a lot of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to learn, study, play, and play again. A lifetime's worth, or perhaps three. I used to feel like I had a handle on the gist of the period, and I used to think I had a good narrative to give to my students to help them understand the music, the people who wrote it, and the times they lived in.

Now Pleyel has entered my life, much the way Titz did: through string quartets they wrote during 1780s, and I find it difficult to look at music the way I did. It's as if an easy-to-see triangle has become a polyhedron, with sides that interact with one another in ways I will never understand.

(Some of those "sides" are named Boccherini, Dittersdorf, Stamitz, Gluck, Clementi, Vanhal, Titz, and Pleyel.)

Everyone knows the name of Pleyel. Heck. There is even a website for the piano company that Ignaz Pleyel opened in 1807. He was born the year after Mozart in a lower Austria (the town that is mentioned in the Wikipedia article seems no longer to exist), and seemed to be a middle child (he was the 24th of 38 children) of a school master and his very fertile and always-pregnant wife. 38 children. Imagine. If she started at 14, she would have had to have one child per year until the age of 52, and live to tell the tale. Now this is curious.

Anyway, Ignaz had excellent teachers (Vanhal and Haydn), and he got a good job in the French city of Strasbourg (the border city with the German name). In 1791 (the year that Mozart died, and a tough year for musicians in France--what, with the Revolution and all), Pleyel went to London. Haydn, Pleyel's old teacher, was in London, so Pleyel had some healthy competition. So did Haydn, for that matter. It certainly made musical life in London even more lively. Pleyel happened to return to Strasbourg during the Reign of Terror, and to escape being put in prison or being killed, he wrote music to celebrate the Republic. He became a French citizen, and moved to Paris to start a publishing business. He began by publishing a complete edition of Haydn's string quartets, and made his fortune by publishing music by Boccherini and Beethoven, among others.

This is all very impressive, but what I find most impressive is the quality of his "Prussian" String Quartets, which are available in the IMSLP. You need to follow some complicated directions to get the score to print out properly, but the parts are original, intact, and very readable, both visually and playing-wise.

Here are the first three, the second three, and the third group of three.

I hope you're curious.

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).