Excellent Recording of Marshall's Third Viola Sonata by Daniele Colombo

My brother has a true champion of his music in the Italian violinist/violist Daniele Colombo. It makes me and my family so proud to hear his music played so beautifully and so thoughtfully (not to mention impeccably). I can only imagine how happy this would make him if he were still alive.



Marshall Fine (1956-2014) - Sonata no.3 for Unaccompanied Viola op.121 (2011-12)

I. Obsequy
II. Rap-Fugue (03:17)
III. Rhapsody (07:29)
IV. Moto Perpetuo (13:25)

Daniele Colombo, viola

[Roma, AG Studios, 25-3-2016
Sound Engineer: Pierangeli Ambroselli]

The Space Around Us When We Play

I just returned from a few well-deserved days of vacation in Los Angeles away from playing or even thinking about playing, but when our daughter showed me and Michael a yoga-influenced exercise yesterday that involved a series of movements that raise awareness of the experience of right and left balance, I immediately thought of how the exercises could be applied to violin and viola playing.

A good 24 hours occupied by travel and sleep (sometimes at the same time) passed between the exercise we did and the time I finally picked up my viola back in Illinois. I closed my eyes (I didn't feel like changing into music glasses) and experienced a totally new kind of spacial relationship with my instrument. I will attempt to describe it here.

[It felt as if I were in a dream state having some kind of "vision." I'm writing about here to share, but I'm also writing about it so that I don't forget it!]

While I was playing the Bach G major Prelude I thought of my bow arm traveling along the circumference of a pie chart.

The A string was the yellow 10%, the blue 10% corresponded to the D String, the Green to the G string, and the red to the C string. This all makes perfect sense, and shouldn't be news to any string player reading this. What came as kind of a revelation to me is that my pie chart image was a not-very-thick disc, and that the circumference of the pie chart changed with where in the bow I happened to be. This gave the shape of each of the wedges a new kind of meaning for me.

Then I realized that I so often think of the "where" of my bow as being the "where" of my hand, when, in fact, the "where" of the bow goes both right (towards my hand) and left, towards the mysterious and exciting space that surrounds the tip of the bow on the "other side" of the wheel.

The core of my body (my heart and breathing mechanism) are at the very center of the wheel. I often give my students the image of a fulcrum on a teeter-totter to think of the bow on the string, but the image of a disk or wheel is so much more intense and useful because the space is solid and filled in.

So often as a flute player I thought of projecting my sound either forward or upward. I tried to imagine my sound going to other places in the room by focusing my eyes on different objects, but it always seemed directional, as if there were a dotted line connecting my mouth to the object. It was also very difficult to sustain attention on projecting towards different objects, because it was all something that happened in my imagination. I could sustain attention on it when playing long tones, but not when playing music when there was counting to be done and accidentals to pay attention to. All the "action" in flute playing happens on the right, so the mysterious area to the left is often left unexplored, particularly while practicing.

It IS really different with a string instrument. The movements that cut into in the surrounding space are the very things that make the sound.

I'll go practice now . . .

Bach and Serendipity

Michael and I just returned from an extremely satisfying concert of Bach played by Richard Goode. He played a couple of Preludes and Fugues from the second book of the WTC, all the Sinfonias, the Fifth French Suite, the C minor Partita, and the Italian Concerto. His encore was the Serenade from the B-flat Partita.

The concert made us both very happy.

On the way home Michael asked me how I thought Richard Goode compared to Angela Hewitt. It's hard for me to compare pianists unless I hear them play the same repertoire.

We eventually turned on the car radio, and would you believe that the Italian Concerto was playing? We got to hear nearly the whole thing. The pianist? Angela Hewitt!

And both of us preferred the way Richard Goode played the Italian Concerto this evening to the way Angela Hewitt played it on her recording.

Van Gogh on the Work of an Artist and the Future

These excerpts from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on May 20, 1888 resonate for me (and probably will for other composers):

. . . At the height of artistic life therein, and remains, and returns time and again, a hankering after real life--ideal and unattainable.

And sometimes one lacks the will to throw oneself back wholeheartedly into art, and to regain one's capacity for it. One knows one is a cab horse, and that one is going to be hitched up to the same old cab again--and that one would rather not, and would prefer to live in a meadow, with sunshine, a river, other horses for company as free as oneself, and the act of procreation.

And perhaps, in the end, the heart complaint is caused by that. I shouldn't be at all surprised if it is to some extent. One no longer rebels against things, but neither is one resigned--one is ill and does not get better--and one cannot find a precise cure.

I'm not sure who called this condition "being stricken by death and immortality." The cab one is pulling along must be of some use to people one doesn't know. And so, if we believe in the new art, in the artists of the future, our presentiment will not play us false.

When good old Corot said a few days before his death, "Last night in a dream, I saw landscapes with skies all pink," well, they've arrived, haven't they, those pink skies, and yellow and green ones into the bargain, in the impressionist landscape? Which means that some things one can force in the future do indeed come about.

And those of us who are, as I am led to believe, still fairly far from death, nevertheless feel that these things are bigger than we are and will outlive us.

We do not feel we are dying, but we do feel that in reality we count for little, and that to be a link in the chain of artists we are paying a high price in health, in youth, in liberty, none of which we enjoy, any more than does the cab horse pulling a coachload of people out enjoying themselves in spring.

Cloak of Invisibility

Some people fantasize about the power wearing a cloak of invisibility might give them. I'm just the opposite. There is nothing that makes me feel more powerless than the feeling of being invisible. Perhaps it is a "middle child" thing, but I often go through life doing what I do and taking up the space I take up without the feeling that I am being seen. It might have something to do with being short of stature in a world where most adult heads hover six inches above mine. It might even have something to do with being a violist, since in orchestral and chamber music situations we are often invisible (though sorely missed when we are not there).

I have had periods of what I tend to think of as "visibility by association." Over the years I have been thought of as Marshall's sister, Burton's daughter, Baker's student, Michael's wife, Rachel's mom, Ben's mom, or this or that person's friend. When I worked at a radio station and wrote CD reviews, there were people who seemed interested in getting to know me because they believed that I was in some kind of position to help them with their career objectives. Some of those people actually got to know me as a person rather than as a "contact," and became good friends.

There are long-time residents of our small university town who know me by what I do or what I have done, but to most of the newer musicians in town, I am invisible. It is sad that I am also invisible to their students. I am not invisible to the musicians I associate with in the larger towns where I do most of my playing, which helps me to keep going when my internal motivation mechanism gets overwhelmed.

I know that my situation is not unique to me or to musicians. There are a great many people who feel powerless because they have been rendered invisible. My heart goes out to the people in Flint, Michigan. My heart goes out to the faculty and staff at our local university. Many people have lost their jobs, and many more are anticipating pay cuts because our governor will not pass a budget to provide funding for state universities. People may demonstrate (I will demonstrate with them) but in this situation we are essentially powerless and invisible. There is too much power in the hands of our governor, and he has not shown that he is a person to be trusted with power. I feel sorry for the people who voted for him in good conscience. Especially the people who have lost their jobs because of him and the local elected officials who support him.

Perhaps one of the reasons I admire Bernie Sanders so much is that for decade after decade after decade he has spoken out about inequality and has maintained his search for truth by "walking the walk." The corporate media is trying to make him invisible, and they are doing it because they are afraid of having a president in office who might change the way elections are funded. A Sanders presidency would mean, in part, that the various institutions of the corporate media might lose out on the huge amount of money and power they acquire every time we have a big election.

The absence of coverage for Bernie Sanders's accomplishments in this presidential race has become noticeable. And if it continues (and I believe that Sanders's success will) the press might have to make some significant changes on its own. Let's hope that day arrives soon.

What's an Election?

[Posted by a very proud mother. Please play it for your children, students, and grandchildren.]

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.]