Marlene Dietrich as You Have Never Seen Her Before

Margie King Barab writes all about her first encounter with Marlene Dietrich!

The Dot and the Line: Music by Eugene Poddany

This wonderful piece of classic animation, with music by Eugene Poddany, came bundled with "The Glass Bottom Boat," a Doris Day movie that Michael and I found funny mainly for its large helping of prop-related double entendre. Doris Day, who was 40 at the time, plays a young widow who catches the eye of a big shot rocket scientist where she works (NASA). He asks her to be his personal biographer. Hmm.

I won't mention anything about the CIA director who has an important part in the film, but I will mention that Paul Lynde appears in drag.

Charles Gounod on Composers and Society

The society of artists is dying on its feet. . . . Each member pivots around his neighbor. There is no progress toward an avowed purpose, toward a clearly perceived end. . . . This anarchy is a sad spectacle; time will put an end to it, but when will that time come? I think it will be when the masses develop a tendency of some kind to opinions of their own. . . . The public accepts an infinite number of productions, varied and even opposed to their points of view; and they enjoy the very contradictions. They split their affection and their sympathies, and necessarily divide the effectiveness of their stimulus to such a degree that they no longer even give an impetus to artists. . . . It seems to me that the principle of evil lies in this absence of a universal need. I believe, in a word, that the artist's growth stems from all the power and all the moral, intellectual, and religious energy of the epoch to which he belongs, and that society expresses itself through him in proportion to the vitality and activity it transmits to him.

This is part of a letter that Gounod wrote to a friend in 1847 when he was living in a Carmelite monastery. [Translated by Mina Curtiss and published on page 29 of her 1958 book, Bizet and His World. I find the contradictions very interesting, and I find it particularly interesting to think about what Gounod says in relation to life in the 21st century.]

Thoughts on Art and Entertainment

As I've said a million times, there has been an attempt, largely successful, to confuse what you might call art and what you might call entertainment. I think there's a very simple distinction, and it doesn't diminish entertainment in any way, because we all want it and we all enjoy it. Entertainment is that which you receive without effort. Art is something where you must make some kind of effort, and you get more than you had before.

Charles Wuorinen said this in a 2005 New York Times interview.

It would be nice to think that what we call art, in any sense of the word, requires a person to somehow, for better or for worse, give something of himself or herself to the material at hand. We all know that a person listening or looking at or reading or even touching art can become somehow changed by it--even in a very tiny way--if he or she makes a certain effort to "meet" it. Unfortunately, without that effort (and the media through which we now experience art doesn't always require effort), even something intended to be experienced as art can be, at best, experienced as entertainment, and if it isn't entertaining enough to be absorbed without effort, it is sometimes ignored completely, or immediately forgotten.

What am I? Chopped Liver?

I use this phrase from time to time, but I only recently learned what it means. According to Jewish culinary tradition, chopped liver was served as a side dish and not as a main dish, so the meaning of the phrase was obvious to everyone who ate. But these days chopped liver is a far cry from your normal side dish, particularly in America, and particularly in the non-urban mid-west. I would actually have to drive three hours north to the Chicago suburbs, or two hours west, to Indianapolis, to even order chopped liver as a side dish at a restaurant (but someone else would have to eat it).

It turns out that I have been using the phrase incorrectly anyway. Most of the time I feel like I should be saying, "I'm not even chopped liver," because more and more it feels like what I do doesn't even classify as a side dish in the dinner party of life. But that doesn't sound as good. I'm hoping that the feeling will pass, like the indigestion and heartburn that would eventually pass after eating real chopped liver.

It is possible to make mock chopped liver out of cooked lentils, sautéed onions, ground-up walnuts, a bit of soy sauce, a bit of miso, and a bit of broth. There's another recipe I found that uses sautéed, chopped mushrooms rather than lentils.

Eternally Young Elliott Carter

I never thought I would fall into the Carter obituary vortex, but here I am.

I find this video so interesting. Alisa Weilerstein, who is quite young, has the kind of guarded "grown up" affectation (and diction) that I often observe in successful string players in their 20s and 30s (perhaps she was nervous). Elliott Carter, who is quite old (103 in this video) actually seems young and free in comparison.

He is so physically IN the music when he talks about it. The way he speaks is never guarded. It is expressive and honest, both when he is talking with Alisa, and when he is coaching her.

Carter Eight Etudes and a Fantasy

I'll never forget the day that a woodwind quartet from the California School of the Arts came to my high school on a recruiting trip, and played Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for us. The piece, written in 1950, was a revelation to me back in 1975, and it still continues to be extremely and eternally inspiring, particularly because you can hear the obvious joy Carter had during the process of writing it.

I could describe how the piece works in more detail, but Jeremy Grimshaw has already written a fine analysis.

Our President Thanks the Young People who Ran his Campaign

This is great to watch for more reasons than I can articulate:

Building Listening Skills

I find so often that my community college students (many who are grown-up products of "no child left behind") have a great deal of trouble listening. There is not that much of a problem during class, when the visual help of a study guide (and a study guide guide, like a teacher) can help them keep on track while listening to a piece of music, but left to their own devices, many of them are at sea.

The problem affects every subject.

It is difficult for many people to keep "stuff" you hear in a class in the foreground, and it is easy to let constant internal chatter drown out what a teacher might be saying. It is also easy, in a world where music is mostly thought of as "background" to simply tune it out.

Thanks to the popularity of video games, children are quite visually sophisticated these days. When they play video games, they respond to visual stimulation immediately and physically by moving a mouse or pressing buttons on a touch screen. They make strategic decisions based on what they see, and have a great deal of fun doing it.

I wish there were some compelling and sophisticated games that all children, regardless of musical aptitude, could use to learn to practice listening to patterns attentively without the aid of visual stimulation. There seem to be so many children and young adults who can identify visual patterns with ease, and, it seems, there are relatively few young adults who can follow arguments, or write a compelling ones themselves. Very small children love language. They love rhythm, they love rhymes, and many love singing. Why should they lose this when they become old enough to go to school?

Following a piece of music is not that difficult when you know what to listen for. There are repetition schemes that help you keep your place, if you pay attention to where you are. Following an argument (in any discipline) takes similar skills. When you write an argument of your own, you need to know where you've been, where you are, and where you are going in order to express your point successfully.

I think that the skills developed by listening attentively (and with guidance) to music that is written using dance forms, song forms, and the basic classical instrumental forms might enhance these skills.

Four More Years!

Large sigh of relief! Here's to a better world!

Trio for Violin, Viola, and Piano

Here's a link to new piece I wrote for this (sadly) often ignored kind of piano trio.

Bellwether

Vigo county, our neighbor to the east in Indiana, has always been a bellwether county, or, rather THE bellwether county, since it has forecasted the winner of every presidential election since 1956. Here, with 100% of the votes in, we can see how close this election really is. Obama won by a whopping 162 votes.

162 thanks!

Now I feel less anxious.

Lengthy Reflections on "A Late Quartet"

Now that the "A Late Quartet" is playing in a few major cities, I'll let free some observations that might be interesting to people who have seen the film (I wrote a "preview" review that had very few plot details a few weeks ago). If you haven't seen the film you might want to wait a while to read this post. I have read several reviews from its LA and New York showings, and have found very little written about details that make me STILL think about the film every day. Nobody seems, for example, to mention the props and the sets and they way they relate to the characters, so I will begin with those.

First, there are the households. Robert and Juliette Gelbart, the second violinist and violist of the quartet, clearly live on the upper west side of New York. Everything about their apartment not only screams "Upper West Side," but it screams of the Upper West Side I knew during the 1980s, and occasionally observed during the 1990s. My father used to call the Upper West Side "Piano Town," because that's where all the pianists he knew lived, but I learned (when I moved there) that it is populated by musicians of every stripe. The rents used to be rather cheap, the walls were thick (good for practicing), and it was easy to get where you needed to go to play or teach.

Their apartment is relatively small, and we see "Jules," as she is called, practicing in her bedroom. It's hard to imagine where Alex, their daughter, might have fit in that apartment, but when we learn that the Fugue was on tour for eight months out of the year, I imagine that the three Gelbarts didn't spend that much time together there.

The apartment of Daniel, the first violinist, has an area by a bay window where he makes bows. There are bow makers who play quartets, but I can't think of any quartet violinists with serious performing schedules who have the time to make bows. I suppose that his bow making shows that he doesn't have much of a life outside of music. He begins a bow around the time of the beginning of his relationship with Daniel and Juliette's daughter, and the relationship comes to an end after he presents a finished bow to her as a present. The making of the bow measures their relationship.

Daniel's apartment is austere, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and that bay window, which normally would give warmth to a living space, simply supplies light for his bow-making equipment. It could be anywhere in the city, anywhere where you could keep a car.

We see Daniel's car parked right outside Alex's apartment, which is probably in Brooklyn, because nobody could find that kind of "Doris Day Parking" in Manhattan. Everything about Alex is colorful and bright (and beautiful). She has a striped violin case and a really brightly colored apartment that she moves into after returning from what I imagine would have been four years at Curtis in Philadelphia (where the getting in isn't easy for anyone, and the tuition is free). Alex is presented as a serious violinist with aspirations to become a successful quartet musician herself, but she seems more serious about rebelling against her mother, who bears the brunt of everyone's "issues," in addition to coming to grips with her own life-long sense of loss. That's often the position of a violist in a quartet musically, and it's the position of many violists who are involved in musical life "à quatre."

The Fugue Quartet rehearses in Peter's house. It must be a house because it has two floors, and the whole downstairs seems to be panelled in wood. It's old-school (like him), and in nearly every frame taken in his house there is a framed picture of Miriam, his late wife. She died one year before the action of the film takes place, and her presence and absence in Peter's life is palpable. Peter, who is supposed to be in his later 70s or early 80s, seems to be surrounded by death. When he and Juliette (who love one another like father and daughter) go to the Frick together to look at Rembrandt self portraits, he sees them as living things that look at the people looking at them. Towards the end of the movie, we see him holding an LP cover and listening to a recording that the quartet made with his wife, who was a mezzo-soprano. He (and we) have a vision of her singing (it's Anne Sophie von Otter), and the piece she is singing is from Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City).

It is tempting to think about the way the seven-movement structure of Beethoven's Opus 131 could correspond to the film's seven major characters. The members of the Fugue are the central four, and Alex, Miriam, and the Flamenco dancer all pull at the fibers that hold the ensemble together. Calling the ensemble "The Fugue Quartet" is a stroke of brilliance. (Quartets take their names from composers, cities, people, mythological characters, and musical expressions, but I can't think of another quartet that took its name from a musical construction). A fugue is, of course, made of four voices that are highly dependent on one another, echo one another's material in ways that good composers present in uncanny ways, struggle with one another (the stretto is a major component of most big fugues), chase one another around, and keep asserting their identity by stating the subject and countersubject in their different voices. Adding more voices to a fugue complicates things.

Beethoven's Opus 131 begins with a fugue. As far as I know, it is the first string quartet ever written that begins with a fugue. The first movement changes keys several times (also unusual), and when the fugue is over, both the meter and tempo change. We know that the second movement has started. The third movement is kind of an interlude (it accompanies the "interlude" between Robert and Pilar, the flamenco dancer), and the fourth movement develops and reverses the motive of the interlude. Director Yaron Zilberman uses the fourth movement as the background of the meeting between Juliette and Daniel on a bridge in Central Park, and bits and pieces from it (it is a very long movement with a lot of material and many changes in tempo and meter) punctuate other parts of the action. There are grand pauses between fragments towards the end of the fourth movement, and the fifth movement feels like a scherzo but behaves like a rondo. Then everything goes all ponticello, and all the members of the quartet start bowing on the bridge and making eerily ghostly sounds. The sixth movement acts like a slow introduction to the seventh movement, which seems to take many of the seemingly disparate themes and motives of the movements that preceded it, and present them with a sense of unity, as if byegons are byegons, and all is well, albeit in C sharp minor.

The last scene of the film happens during a concert. Robert has been living in a hotel room because Juliette kicked him out of the apartment. Robert reacted to Daniel's relationship with his daughter physically, and things are not good between them, but they still have the first concert of their new season to play and Opus 131 is on the program. Peter is really suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's, but has agreed to play anyway.

The Fugue Quartet plays the beginning of each movement (edited nicely), and we get the sense that in spite of all they have been through and how they may feel about one another, they can still do what they are there to do. After the beginning of the seventh movement, Peter suddenly stops playing. He stands up and tells the audience that everything is moving too quickly for him and that he cannot continue. Then he asks Nina Lee, the cellist of the Brentano Quartet to take his place. She walks on stage from the wings, cello in hand. Robert and Juliette have a brief, spontaneous, and tender reconciliation (perhaps it was the power of playing Beethoven together in concert), and Nina sits down to play.

Robert (the risk taker in the ensemble, who has threatened the unity of the quartet by suggesting that the two violinist take turns playing first violin) made it clear in the beginning of the movie that he has always wanted to perform Opus 131 from memory (a few quartets have done this, but it is not common quartet practice). After Daniel stands up to tell the audience that you can't "ride the horses" of the seventh movement without being prepared by the sixth movement, he spontaneously decides to close his music and play to the end of the piece from memory. Robert reacts by closing his music, and then Juliette closes her music. It looks like Nina might even have closed her music (she must have played the piece with them before). Since Nina is a real cellist, something kind of magical happens when she puts bow to string and plays. The non- (or novice) string player actors react physically to her physical presence on the instrument, and it made me laugh out loud, because they all became more physically engaged than they had in all their carefully-choreographed playing scenes from earlier in the movie.

There is one detail that I found quaint and rather of implausible. Robert and Juliette go to an auction to buy their daughter a violin. The instrument they are interested in is a Gagliano. Robert "plays" a single phrase of Ziegeunerweisen on the instrument, and decides it is good for his daughter. The bidding begins, and it ends with a guy in a business suit bidding $25,000 for it, and Robert and Juliette storming out after they were outbid. $25,000 for a Gagliano? Regardless of which Gagliano the instrument was made by, only in a fantasy world would it sell at auction for that little. $250,000 would be more like it!

A Level-headed Look at Musical Prodigies

Half the prodigies I studied seemed to be under pressure to be even more astonishing than they naturally were, and the other half, to be more ordinary than their talents. Studying their families, I gradually recognized that all parenting is guesswork, and that difference of any kind, positive or negative, makes the guessing harder.

This comes from a very sane article by Andrew Solomon in Sunday's New York Times Magazine about musical prodigies and the parents that raise them. It is interesting to note that many parents who find they have unusually smart children start them on music because it gives them something challenging to do that offers them constant stimulation and the personal rewards that only music can bring. It seems almost like the polar opposite motive of a "Tiger Mother" who tries to make her children smart and accomplished by giving them music lessons, and insisting that they excel in order to feel that they are loved.

Amateurish Ramble

When I was in high school there were three kinds of musicians. There were people who were equally good at music and academic subjects, there were people who did music as an activity, but put their studies and sports ahead of what they did with music, and then there were the people who didn't worry about their grades because they knew that practicing was ultimately more important. Music was what they were planning to do, and everything else was, well, everything else.

I, of course, fit into the latter category.

I grew up in a boom time for music, and had all the advantages of being a music insider in a boom town (Boston), which led me to feel very comfortable in New York. I never had any doubts that I would be able to make my living as a musician, but being a flutist I knew I had to work at least ten times as hard as a string player to get a job, and that the job that I would get might not be in America. I considered this a fair challenge, and met it with energy and enthusiasm. I was not equipped to embark on adult life as an amateur. I didn't have the skills.

I graduated from Juilliard in 1980, but I didn't want to get a master's degree (you could get one in a single year at Juilliard) and look for a university job (you only needed a master's back in the 70s and 80s) because I was well aware of the employment limitations for flute players and the competitiveness that they would encounter. I didn't want to be in the professional position of "encouraging" the next generation of flutists to major in performance and enter the competition for orchestral jobs. Orchestras only carry three or four flutists, and most of them hang onto their jobs for life. If I were teaching in a college and not playing in an orchestra, what credibility would I have with students anyway?

There were plenty of jobs for string players, and even plenty of jobs for pianists and singers during the 1970s, particularly in New York. The wind, brass, and percussion players who played really well and knew a bit about the politics of getting work had work to do. When I left New York in 1980 for personal reasons, I figured that I could always return and would always be able to find playing work. When I did return after the first Recession, there was very little flute playing work. There was still work for string players, so I considered the problem a flute-related one: New York had become, in my absence, overpopulated with good flutists.

When I returned I found that synthesized music had started taking over the Broadway pits. Now, in 2012, the very nature of music for the Broadway and Off-Broadway theater has changed entirely. Whatever studio work remains has been dispersed across the country (though not into my neck of the woods), and it is harder and harder to find an orchestra that can guarantee that it will continue to exist from season to season. There are more highly accomplished musicians (including string players) in America than I imagine there have ever been, and even if there were as many places for them to do professional work as there were in the 1970s and 80s, I imagine only a fraction of them would be able to make ends meet, particularly in an expensive city like New York.

Then there's academia, which was once a haven for musicians who were willing to, for better or for worse, encourage their students to make music their livelihood. The students that succeed need to have marketing skills that are as good as their musical skills. Youth, good looks, great social skills, and a financial cushion help, as well as the willingness to think and move outside of the "classical box." Meanwhile, tenure-track positions are rare, and people are lining up for whatever adjunct positions happen to open up. Anywhere. (And now in any discipline of the arts and the humanities, but that's the subject for a future rant.)

So the rest of us are now faced with playing for money once in a while, and making most of our living working at something else. Does that make us amateurs? If we are, we certainly don't fall under the usual definition of an amateur! Perhaps we can't support ourselves by our playing or our composing (I heard that laugh), but we can, if we are not beaten down by the greater culture, play and write just as well as if we were paid great sums of money. When the market economy (i.e. the private sector) tells us that what we are doing is essentially useless because it isn't popular with a significant part of the population, we can let it get to us, or we can rise above it, and keep practicing until things change.

Maybe, once this 30-year era of ridiculous greed has passed (and I wonder if Hurricane Sandy might have stuck a serious blow to it), more people will develop a relationship with music (particularly the "classical" kind), and will want to hear it played for them in real time and in real space rather than through electronic reproduction of a rendered performance delivered in mp3 quality directly into their heads, where nobody else can share the experience. Perhaps they will even want to pay for the experience, again and again. There are certainly enough musicians around to fill that kind of need.