It's That Time of Year Again (Our Annual March Concert of Music Written by Women)

My friend John David and I play two recitals every year. Half of the music we play comes from female composers, and half of the music we play comes from male composers. I'm very excited about this year's Women's History and Awarness Month program, because it has some really terrific music on it, and everything was written originally for the viola.

Minna Keal's "Ballade," was written for the viola, but it is sometimes played by cellists (in the same octave, save a few notes, as the viola), and my Luxury Suite has a version for cello that is sometimes in the same octave as the original. Lionel Tertis, the great British violist and muse for composers interested in writing for the viola, admired the Ballade. Keal wrote it in 1928, while she was a student at the Royal Academy of Music. She revised it for publication in 1992.

Pamela Harrison's 1946 Sonata for Viola and Piano is a terrific piece that was written during the later part of England's viola-centric period (with Lionel Tertis as its focal point). Vavaria Gaigarova's Opus 8 Sonata is one of her earlier works. She dedicated it to Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky (1900-1972), who taught viola at the Moscow Conservatory.

The pieces by Harrison and Gaigarova were both published long after the death of their composers. Harrison died in 1990, and her Sonata was published in 2001; Gaigarova died in 1944 (at the age of 41), and her Sonata was published in 1969, four years before the death of Borisovsky, its dedicatee (and editor).

A Few Quick Thoughts About Tempo

All tempo is relative.

Unless you are playing with a metronome, it is really difficult to maintain exactly the same tempo throughout an entire movement.

Why would you want to, anyway?

The more complicated a piece is harmonically, the more time a person who is listening needs to process the music.

The same goes for serious leaps in register.

Many composers write metronome markings that are too fast.

Sometimes composers write metronome markings that are too slow.

The same composer can do both.

The right tempo is the tempo that is right for the people playing and the acoustics of a space.

The right tempo is a tempo that is within the technical capabilities of the people playing.

The right tempo for you and your musical partner(s) may not be the right tempo for me and mine.

The tempo that happens in a rehearsal may not necessarily be the tempo that will happen in a performance.

But that's just fine.

Board of Education film of Chicago in the 1940s

My mother grew up in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s. It is a different world from the Chicago of today.

June Fine (June 30, 1932 - February 14, 2016)

My mother died peacefully in her sleep this morning. Her imminent death was not a surprise, and everyone in her family was able to see her and/or talk to her during her last several weeks, but the finality of it is still profound. Michael and I, along with my brother and his wife, were with her last Saturday, and I feel that nothing I wanted to say to her was left unsaid. I played her a recording of my Piccolo Sonata, which had been performed a few days before our visit, and I read her "The Pen and the Inkwell," a Hans Christian Andersen that always made me think of her wit and motivations, particularly for her artwork.

But there are things I would have wanted her to know. Yesterday, for example, Michael and I were at the Van Gogh exhibit at the Art Institute in my mother's home town of Chicago. It was a members-only preview so we actually got to get close enough to really look at the paintings. Michael and I both remarked that some of Van Gogh's early work is similar to some of my mother's work. They painted the same kinds of things, and it feels like there was a similar resonance in their emotional connection to objects, houses, and things of nature.

You can see my mother's paintings here.

My mother came to art later in her life. She was born with a great musical ear, a tremendous intellect, and an iron will. She went to Chicago Musical College as a flutist and studied with Julius Baker for a while. I'm pretty sure that the reason Baker took me as a student was became of my mother, who often mentioned how much he enjoyed her name (June Blume). There was one point in my childhood in Newton when my mother, who taught at the All Newton Music School, had a flutist colleague named April Showers. My mother did not make her maiden name public, so the beauty of this synchronicity was only appreciated by a select few.

My mother had rheumatic fever at the age of eight, and it left her with rheumatoid arthritis which compromised mobility in her hands. She began playing the flute for finger therapy, and became an accomplished flutist. She and my father met playing together in the Grant Park Symphony in Chicago. They married and moved to Cleveland, where she was active as a flutist (she loved Cleveland), and then they moved to Newton, Massachusetts when my father got a job in the Boston Symphony. In addition to teaching at the All Newton Music School and playing principal flute in the Newton Symphony, my mother also went to Emerson College to study music therapy, which was a relatively new field in the 1970s.

Eventually my mother's arthritis (and complications with surgery) made it impossible for her to play the flute, so she devoted her musical energies to singing. She was a founding member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which became the official chorus for the Boston Symphony. She had a good voice (and absolute pitch), but not a great voice, so she moved her expressive energies in the direction of art.

My mother always drew well (I have some of her early artwork), so she devoted her time and talent to learning how to paint with oils and water colors. Eventually she got a job working as a secretary at Mass Art, and was able to take classes there. She wanted to study seriously, and had to persuade the faculty members at Mass Art that as an older student she was just as capable of learning as a younger student would be.

She spent every weekend painting, and she had a storefront studio-gallery in Newton Highlands. All was well, until macular degeneration set in and slowly robbed her of her vision. When she could no longer see colors sharply, she did fabric collage, and when she could no longer do fabric collage, she had to stop doing artwork altogether.

When she began to lose her vision she threw her energies into writing (something she had always done, to a certain extent), and she wrote three novels and a couple of children's books, none of which have been published. She was always an avid reader, so her blindness made her a huge consumer of audiobooks (thanks to the Perkins Library). One of my greatest joys was going on their website and picking out books that I thought my mother would enjoy, and then talking with her about them. After Michael and I read Moby Dick together this past May (the inaugural book of our reading club), my mother read the audio book. In addition to audiobooks, she was an avid NPR listener.

When she knew that her life was coming to an end due to tongue and throat cancer, which was at stage four when she was diagnosed, she elected not to treat it because treatment would include not only chemotherapy and radiation, but the removal of her tongue and part of her jaw. This would end her ability to talk and eat, which were the two pleasures left to her. Her family and friends supported her in her decision. Her greatest desire was to remain alive long enough to vote in the primary. I think that she left this earth knowing that the political winds were blowing in a slightly more leftward direction.

[Michael also wrote a post about my mother on his blog.]

Play

I have a group of students who take the task of learning to play the violin seriously. We spend lessons disciplining left hands and bow arms, and I try to instill levity into the process. I try to make the work fun, because I actually enjoy work.

(Sometimes I liken training the fingers of the left hand, particularly the pinkie, to training a dog.)

(It usually makes my students smile.)

Once a student gets the upper hand on the technical stuff in a piece, and once a student is able to make a beautiful sound (I believe that a beautiful sound can happen from the beginning) at will, it's time to exercise the musical imagination.

I find that simply asking someone to play with imagination doesn't generate much in the way of musical excitement. Perhaps one of the reasons that children like to play with toys is that toys act as a springboard for the imagination. A toy can act as an object outside of the self that can be used to create a unique narrative. I suppose that even an imaginary friend or a character in a story can fill the purpose. The instrument and bow are tools that can act as toys as long as they are put into a context, but learning how to instill a sense of play in music making is what really makes for individualized performances and honest personal expression.

I suggested to one student that approaching a performance is kind of like starting a game in a team sport. We used basketball as an example because she likes to play basketball. At the beginning of a game everyone knows the rules, everyone knows the part of the court they are responsible for, and everyone has the necessary equipment. Once the game begins it becomes exciting because of the play that happens spontaneously when the elements (and people) interact. You cannot force excitement in a basketball game (or any other game), but you can allow, through the interplay of elements, excitement to happen.

When you are having fun, people who are watching the game are having fun.

It's the same with music. The elements in the music: the themes, the phrases, the articulations, the dynamics, the harmonies, the dialogues, and all sorts of other unnamable elements enter onto the "court," and the result is play. We toss melodies back and forth, we reach for high notes, and we execute difficult passages with precision. We follow the natural rebound of the bow on the string (or the tongue on the airstream), and we extend our awareness way beyond what is right in front of our eyes. The more awareness we have of what is happening in the music, the more interesting and exciting it becomes to play it.

Piccolo World

I imagine that I am one of a relative handful of people who had a "windward" musical path of self-taught recorder to violin, and then to piccolo before settling into a decade-long (is that all it was?) monogamy with the modern flute.

I remember a few distinct episodes. One happened in seventh grade. In our English class we were instructed to set a poem to music. Our teacher meant, of course, that we should choose recorded music to play as background for a poem we would read aloud. I suppose I didn't understand the assignment properly, because I chose a poem (from our anthology) that was musical in itself, and immediately set it as a song with instrumental background.

I had stopped playing the violin at the beginning of sixth grade, and recorder playing was horrible at the time (I hadn't practiced since I was five or six). My mother offered her old (and broken) F.O. Adler piccolo to me, and I found that it had exactly the "cool" sound that I wanted as background for my poem. I even remember the poem (by Carl Wendell Hines, Jr.)

Yeah here am I am standing at the crest of a tallest hill with a trumpet in my hand & dark glasses on.
Bearded & bereted I proudly stand! but there are no eyes to see me. I send down cool sounds! but there are no ears to hear me. My lips they quiver in aether-emptiness! there are no hearts to love me.

I also remember the way we changed it (nobody told us that we couldn't change it) in order to make it more musical.

Yeah here am I, standing at the crest of the highest hill, with my trumpet in my hand, and dark glasses on.

Bearded and berated am I, but I have no eyes to see with. I send down cool sounds, but I have no ears to hear with

Of course I remember the melody, but I'm not sharing it here.

We worked in pairs. I worked with my friend Debbie who read the poem while I played the piccolo. While we were working on this project Debbie told me that the two of us should play recorder in the band (she had heard that was a possibility). I had the use of this piccolo, so I joined the band with that. During the summer I taught myself to play my mother's Haynes flute, and then I entered eighth grade with an Armstrong flute of my own (purchased used from the Rayburn Music Company down the street from Symphony Hall in Boston). I practiced and practiced, and by ninth grade I was using my mother's Haynes and taking lessons with a flutist in the Boston Symphony.

The Powell flute company stopped making piccolos some time during the 1960s, and my mother had an order that they were unable to fill. When they started making piccolos again in the 1975 they contacted my mother, who could no longer play because of a botched hand operation, and I became the proud owner of the first of the new Powell piccolos.

That piccolo served me well. I ended up playing much of the standard orchestral repertoire on it at Juilliard, in Hong Kong, and in Boston. I eventually sold the instrument to buy a violin bow.

In 2007 I wrote a sonata for piccolo and piano that I called "Piccolo Sonata," because it is a little piece (11 minutes long) and it is for the piccolo. This Tuesday I am going to hear it performed for the first time. I am very excited.

Youth: A Warning

Michael and I were both enticed by the trailer: a conductor/composer named Fred Ballinger played by Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel in a movie other than Smoke (a movie we both love) and a young boy violinist staying at the Swiss vacation spot, who just happens to be practicing a piece the Michael Caine character wrote.

We were both excited to see the movie yesterday. We had to drive another to another town to see one of the limited showings offered by the art theater there (the name of the theater is actually the "Art Theater"). The place was packed with people our ages and older. It was a good sign.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt for the first 20 minutes (it seemed like there were 20 minutes before the film's title appeared). In those few minutes I developed some sympathy for Fred, but I also had the slight suspicion that the film makers didn't know what they should about music and musicians. The guy was the music director at the "philharmonic" for 29 years, and (like all music directors, I suppose) he was a composer.

The Queen of England sends her emissary to the vacation spot to ask Ballinger to come out of retirement and conduct a performance of his "Simple Songs." She also wants to knight him, but Fred refuses on both counts. There is a piece of red cellophane in his fingers that he moves rhythmically. Absurd dreams spiced with nudity pop up here and there, and it is sometimes hard to tell which sequences are dreams and which sequences are reality.

I started looking at my watch seriously about 50 minutes into the movie. I started thinking about the time (what's left of my youth) I was wasting in the theater. I started thinking about the horrible script and the lines these fine actors were asked to deliver.

Michael and I agreed that it was kind of like Wes Anderson meets Fellini, but the result didn't carry the merits of either.

Shall I go into musical details? Why not. I hope that nobody reading this will waste the time or money to see this movie in a theater. The movie begins with someone singing a pop song. Later there is a music video with a pop star who is the new girlfriend of Harvey Keitel's character Mick Boyle's son (who was in the process of divorcing Fred's daughter). The Swiss vacation hotel has musical entertainment outside on a revolving circular stage that is set in the middle of a pool of water. Various novelty acts appear, all musically uninteresting.

The climax comes after Fred, in a scene that might have been left on the cutting room floor, decides to accept his knighthood and agrees to conduct "the philharmonic" in a concert of his "Simple Songs." The concert hall is a European traditional hall with gold-leaf and balconies. The men in the audience all wear black tuxedos with white shirts. The orchestra (which looks like a bunch of real musicians, and has an impressive-looking viola section) sits on a white stage with a white background and no walls (green-screened in as far as I can tell). The violinist Viktoria Mullova comes onstage (at least they had the decency to hire a real--and good--violinist), followed by a singer and an apathetic-looking (part of his character) Fred Ballinger. It's clear that Caine has no idea how to conduct, but, thankfully, the camera doesn't spend much time on him in this scene. The violin playing is good (particularly the off-camera arpeggios), and the singing is good (after the first few words of the text I was happy not to be able understand her diction). The audience is mesmerized. No one even claps at the end.

I know that I didn't fall asleep. I was paying attention. I somehow managed to miss the most important gesture in the film, and was left wondering why the previously overly-made-up and carefully-pasted-together Jane Fonda character was lying on her back screaming hysterically. Oh well. At least the movie ended.

New Year's Greeting for 2016

Here's a link to a PDF of the music and a recording.

Rimsky-Korsakov writes about Alexander Borodin in 1916

This article from the January 8, 1916 Musical America gives a very personal look into the life of Alexander Borodin and the friendship he had with Rimsky-Korsakov. [A big thanks to Anne Heiles for this.]

A Postcapitalist Musical Economy and the IMSLP

Paul Mason's lengthy article about Postcapitalism in The Guardian got me thinking about the way the new musical economy functions in a world where digital exchange of information has relatively few "real" costs associated with it.

Anyone who knows me knows that I "play" by my own rules. Basically my practice boils down to personal contact. If I show up to play for someone's concert, I expect to be paid. If I decide to donate my services, I consider it a personal gift to the person or organization. If I write a piece for someone, I happily accept payment and consider the payment as something to insure that the person I write the piece for will be the person to give the first performance. Once the piece is performed I like to make it available on the IMSLP for anyone to play.

I no longer send my music to the publisher who holds the copyright on 77 of my pieces because I cannot depend on that publisher to do anything in the way of promotion. My pieces are, for the most part, files on their computer. When a musician buys a piece of music from this publisher (or most publishers) it is printed (nicely) and mailed. The publisher keeps 90% of the asking price (set by the publisher), and I get a royalty for 10%. Sometimes people buy a "mechanical license," which means that they have permission from the publisher to record a piece, if they choose to. Believe me, it rarely amounts to much.

The only measure I have of how many people play my published music is my yearly (sometimes) royalty statement. That measure does not take into account the people who take the music out of libraries (the now-deceased former owner of the music that is now controlled by my current publisher made sure that everything in his catalog made it into the stacks of major music libraries). I like to imagine that those 77 pieces are being played once in a while, but I have no way of knowing if they are, outside of the occasional YouTube video.

Once something is written I do not think of the music itself as a product to sell. It makes me rather nervous when I think of a piece of music being "worth" a set amount of money. When I look at the stats from my Thematic Catalog blog, I see that there have been 7864 visits to my transcription of the Pachelbel Canon. When I follow the link to the IMSLP listing, I see that there have been 19,686 people who downloaded the score.

The value that this IMSLP listing contributes to people who want to play the Pachelbel Canon with their string orchestra or string quartet is pretty great. The value that knowing that people can use the arrangements I make and the music I write (here's the page that has links to the original music I have in the IMSLP) is great for me. It helps me to know that what I do with music is useful and brings people pleasure. I get a great deal of pleasure out of writing and arranging music, and it is great to know that people (thousands of them) get pleasure from playing it. I'm happy to contribute to the musical economy by making accessible music (accessible for people who like to play music that isn't ridiculously difficult to play and to hear) easily accessible to all musicians for free.

But even a post-capitalist musical mindset involves money. The IMSLP, an organization run by a dedicated crowd of volunteers, has to use money to pay for its bandwidth. They have, like every other entity that uses bandwidth, started a fundraising campaign. There is a simple way to become a member (around $20 bucks a year if you make it a multi-year membership), and there are more creative ways. You can even sponsor a composer of your choice (maybe someone will pick me!).

The value of the IMSLP to me as a contributor and as a frequent user is immeasurable, and I'm proud to have done my part to keep it viable.

Sally Ann Performed by The Vinegar Flies

[The banjo playing singer is, of course, our son Ben.]

Music, Medicine, and Trust

I find this video interesting on a number of levels. Clearly the doctor is a fine violinist, but I imagine that the "Tennessee Waltz" is not one of the pieces in his usual repertoire. I also imagine that he is not as comfortable playing by ear as the guitarist/singer/patient (who has to jump octaves when attempting to sing because of the key). Observe at the 46-second mark, when the violinist/doctor, following the form of the song, goes into accompanying mode, and the two musicians "dance" awkwardly for a verse, making connections with one another here and there, exposing personal and musical vulnerabilities and strengths along the way. When it's the violinist's turn to improvise, the guitarist seems happy to accompany/support him as he tentatively searches for plausible variations on bits of the tune.

The music may not be within either of their usual idioms, but it functions as a plausible middle ground, and they share some special moments of musical communication with people like you and me who are touched by seeing and hearing the spoils of an unlikely bit of music-making by people who might never otherwise come into musical contact.

There is more to this patient/guitarist/singer that meets the eye (pun intended). And Dr. Sloan, who works on violins in addition to playing them, is very generous with his collection of instruments.

Train Ride

Today would have been my brother Marshall's 59th birthday. Daniele Colombo (a person I do not know) made this recording of Marshall's 1988 "Train Ride," that I thought I would share here to celebrate. It really "sounds" like Marshall. Thank you Daniele!

"A-List" Music and Other Music

Among musicians there is always dialogue about favorite composers and the like. Almost everyone has the same "A" list, and that "A" list intersects extensively with the "A" list of people who spend more time listening to music than playing it (or do not play at all). I do not need to list those composers here: you know who they are.

During the 12 years of my professional life programming music for a radio station, I made a serious effort to treat A-list composers as equals to the rest of the "pack" that was available on recordings. That self-appointed task became rather easy when Marco Polo, a subsidiary of Naxos (a small budget label during the early 1990s) started offering really fine CD recordings of non A-list composers. It didn't hurt that I had been friends with the founders of that label in Hong Kong, so I received the whole library gratis. The Naxos library and the obscure small-label releases I got to review for the American Record Guide moved our library to the cutting edge as far as non-A-list composers. During the late 1980s and through the 1990s NPR stations spent a lot of time playing "greatest hits" by Rodrigo, Pachelbel, Gershwin (non A-list composers) many times per week, and single movements from larger works by A-list composers. I couldn't turn on an NPR station and hear anything I couldn't identify in the first couple of seconds, but my station, which had a library of only excellent performances of music by composers who were often new to me, offered listeners a challenge to listen to all kinds of new music (particularly "old" new music).

It is very easy to hear something that sounds a bit like (Robert) Schumann or Brahms, for example, and consider it "second-rate" Schumann or Brahms. It is very easy to write off that non-A-list composer as someone unworthy of your attention, and in the same breath write off the piece at hand as something less valuable musically than a piece that is by the A-list composer. If you hear it on a recording it is even easier to make that kind of dismissal, because the performance has been reproduced, and will always sound the same. It doesn't get better, though you may become a better listener. When evaluating something negatively we often decide that there is something wrong with it rather than something wrong with our evaluation of it. (In relationship terms it is kind of like the phrase, "It's not you, it's me," which, of course, usually means the reverse.)

I believe in performing well-written music by composers who never made it to the A list (and never will, since the A list is firmly set in the past). I love to practice music by A-list composers because doing so compels me to grow as a musician in order to meet the A-list composer half way. I love to study, play, and listen to A-list composers, but I feel that my "job" performing good music by composers who never made it to the A list is to make the experience of the music as meaningful as possible for the people listening to it, and, in the case of chamber music, for people playing it. If I have to reach a little more than half way in order to "sell" the immediate experience, and to eradicate the necessity for people listening to resort to comparisons with what the piece is not, I have been successful. Perhaps I have to "believe" even more deeply in the music I am playing than I would have to when playing something familiar, but I feel that it allows music to happen in original and unusual ways.

Status Update

I have been keeping my thoughts to myself lately, and I really don't see much harm in doing so, but, if I have faithful readers (it is really difficult to tell who they are, even with a stat counter) who might be wondering what is going on with me, never fear. All is well in my private life.

Last week I took one of my brother's violas out of the closet and put fresh (though not new) strings on it, and I have been using that instrument to play the Nutcracker (two performances down, four to go). The instrument has a longer string length than the Italian viola I normally play, and it has a very different kind of sound. I'm having a great time exploring the differences between the instruments. My brother's instrument is Welsh, and it has a lower register that speaks remarkably quickly. It would fit right in a chorus of miners in Wales, perhaps singing a baritone part, because it can.

I feel that playing this instrument is a way of honoring my brother. It is a very intimate and special experience. An instrument is not simply an object. It is an extension of the body and the mind. Sometimes it even feels like Marshall's "voice" is coming out of the instrument.

I have writing projects underway, but most of them are arrangements for Summer Strings. I also have a Bachian counterpoint project happening, which is rough-going at times. Original musical thoughts don't distract and obsess me the way they once did. I'm confident that they will return when I am ready, and hopefully I will be able to work with them in new and interesting ways.