Bach Prelude Project

There's very little that is as rewarding for me as spending time with Bach. I tend to devote a lot of time in the summer months (for whatever reason) to making arrangements, and I'm spending this summer making string quartet arrangements of the preludes to the Bach Cello Suites. Several years ago I arranged the G major Prelude, BWV 1007, and a few days ago I finished an arrangement of the C major Prelude, BWV 1009. I just finished a first draft of the D major Prelude, BWV 1012, which is great fun to work on.

I'm putting them into the IMSLP as individual movements, but I'm planning to group them together as a set, which I will make available through my Thematic Catalog blog.

UPDATE: The project is finished! You can get all the links here.

Happy Father's Day

Exquisite Schumann

I have the honor of sitting in a viola section with Jebat Kee, and playing in the orchestra when he conducts during rehearsals (he doubles as the assistant conductor). But it wasn't until this morning that I found his page on YouTube and listened to this beautiful performance of Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, Opus 70, from this past December. I'm sharing it here so you can enjoy it too.

Remote as a verb: a newly-minted alternative definition

re·mote \ ri-ˈmōt \
v. to express heartfelt sentiment through media about people one knows only through media.

[You read it here first!]

A Most Musical Illinois County

The recent news about Lauren Zhang, who began her musical life in our town of Charleston, Illinois in Coles County, and remained here for four years before moving with her family to Birmingham, England, got me thinking about some of the excellent pianists who grew up in our remote-yet-fertile neck of the musical woods.

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Lauren also played violin, and she participated in our Summer Strings program. Here she is playing some Scarlatti:



Before Lauren came to town every music lover in the area got to enjoy hearing Derek Maninfior, who grew up in the neighboring town of Mattoon, Illinois (8 miles away).

He's playing Beethoven here:



Before Derek, there was Kara Huber, who comes from Oakland, Illinois, a very small town a little north of Charleston.

She's playing some Mozart here:



I first got to hear Lauren play piano when she was about six. Her musical personality was already intact. I first heard Kara when she was about eight, and it was a total thrill to hear her. Derek I first heard when he was about 14, and like Lauren and Kara, he already had an intact musical personality.

They say that this part of the country has the best soil anywhere. And it grows musicians exceptionally well. Particularly pianists.

Just because it's June

May was full of promises, but she didn't keep 'em quick enough for some . . .

I was somehow unable to embed this, but you can click right here.

The FANTASTIC choreography is by Rod Alexander, who does not yet have a Wikipedia page. Nora Ephron's parents wrote the screenplay (her father was one of the producers), and the amazing costumes (with fantastic petticoats) were designed by Charles Le Maire.

Richard Rogers wrote the music, and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyrics, but look at who was on the orchestration staff: Robert Russell Bennett (who was the team's usual orchestrator), Earle Hagen, Gus Levene, Nelson Riddle, Herbert W. Spencer, and John Williams.

A String Orchestra Transcription of Beethoven's Charming Sonatine WoO 44a

Beethoven wrote this charming piece for mandolin and harpsichord in 1795 for Countess Josephine Clary, a mandolin-playing amateur singer (and a possible love interest). Two years later Clary married Kristian Krystof von Clam und Gallas, and she became the Countess of Clam-Gallas.

You can get the music for this most charming of pieces on this page of the IMSLP. You can also listen here.

This is from Beethoven's early years in Vienna, and for anyone wondering, WoO means "without opus." Here's a link to a list of the pieces that Beethoven wrote. All the pieces with WoO numbers are from before his Opus 1 or were not published during his lifetime.

Accidental Musical Detective Work

Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1762. The piece below (in the picture above) is from the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits," which is the part of the opera that most people recognize. Haydn's Opus 9 Quartets were published in 1769. I'm not a betting woman, but I would bet that Haydn attended that 1762 production, and a lovely four-measure-long musical gesture from the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" followed him out of the theater and found a home in the Adagio of this lovely, little-known quartet.

Why do I know this piece? I have the honor and privilege of having a long-term project that involves reading through all the Haydn quartets (in order) with a willing set of amateurs (and one former professional) at a local elder care facility where the former professional lives. I get to step out of my comfort zone and play first violin, which, in the case of this quartet, number 14 (of 83 Haydn quartets), was a real challenge.

We played Opus 9, No. 2 this evening, and it was a wonderful experience. So far it's everyone's favorite.

Practicing Long Tones

I have been spending time with Allesandro Casorti's The Techniques of Bowing, and found myself amused and amazed by this page:



44 minutes is a long time to spend practicing long tones. I imagine that you could spend the time meditatively counting breaths, or reading, or thinking about just about anything besides your bow stroke. So I began experimenting, and recorded the results in this video. Don't worry. It's short. But I could easily imagine doing this for 44 minutes.



The Casorti book, from 1909, is full of excellent bowing exercises. They are sort of mindless, but then again the idea of bowing exercises is not to engage the mind but to train the muscles of the fingers and hands to become efficient.

Looking at My Mother's Art This Mother's Day

I'm remembering my mother this Mother's Day by looking at and sharing her art. This painting from 1988 is of our daughter Rachel playing in the sand in Chicago's Bixler Playlot. The Bixler Playlot, a hot-spot for tots on 57th Street, is in the same general neighborhood where my mother grew up.



You can see more of her work here and here.

Violin and Viola Playing and the Crossed-Hand Illusion

In the process of learning to play our instruments, violinists and violists develop odd relationships between our visual and aural sensations. I remind my students that they are developing eyes that hear and ears that see. But it goes beyond that, because the mind's eye becomes intimately involved with the physical act of playing while our actual eyes are busy looking at music. When a violinist or violist looks at his or her left hand, the second finger is hard to see because it is physically obscured by the third finger. This obscuring of the more distant finger happens in our mind's eye as well, so we need to give a bit of extra thought to the act of moving the less-visible finger.

I was working on a double-stop passage with a student today, and she mentioned that she had a lot of trouble moving her second finger because it was so difficult to either see it or visualize it. This brought the "Crossed-Hand Illusion” to mind.



When the hands are crossed in this way, it is very difficult to move any given finger if someone points to it (without touching it). It certainly can be done, but it requires a great deal of additional thought. And it never becomes second nature. You can get better at it though, because with practice you get in the habit of thinking faster when it becomes necessary.

You can see a cute kid-made video demonstrating the crossed-hand illusion here.

After demonstrating the crossed-hand illusion to my student, I noticed that if I dropped my right hand and kept my left hand up in this crossed position, my left hand and arm were exactly in the position I use to hold my instrument.



When playing the violin or the viola the left arm crosses the midpoint of the body, creating the same possibility of finger confusion that happens when playing the cross-hand game. It is unique to violin and viola playing. It doesn't happen with other instrument!

I used to show this game to my beginning students all the time. I would use it as a way to explain that control of the fingers requires thought. I never once considered the direct physical connection with violin and viola position.

I found a bunch of articles about left and right brain stuff, and how crossing of the hands is cognitively beneficial. Here's a very technical one (that I don't pretend do understand). Here's an article about how important it is for brain integration to practice activities that cross the body's midline.

I played the crossed-hand game with my next student at the beginning of her lesson. I then asked her to drop her right hand, leaving her left hand "crossed." Her response was an immediate and decided "whoa!"

Pastiche!

I spend a lot of time playing consort music, so once in a while I like to express my (sometimes retro) musical ideas in the form of a viol consort. Through the magic of investable counterpoint, this pastiche has two viol-consort-like settings:



You can listen to the above version here.



You can listen to the five-viola version here.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

Birthday Piece Number 10

Today is my fifty-ninth birthday, so here is the tenth in a series of "birthday pieces" for viola d'amore and piano that I began when I turned fifty. My first "birthday piece" had fifty measures, and each year I add one more. This year's piece has fifty-nine measures for fifty-nine years. My viola d'amore is in the shop getting some repairs done, so this year's birthday piece can be played on either viola or viola d'amore. You can listen to a computer-generated recording here, and you can get the music on this page of the IMSLP.

You can find the rest of my birthday pieces in the IMSLP too.

Paul Hindemith clearly knew the music of Algernon Ashton, and so should you

The first example is from the second movement of Algernon Ashton's Viola Sonata, Opus 44, and the second example is from the second movement of Paul Hindemith's Viola Sonata, Opus 11, number 4.

The homage is palpable.

Ashton was born in Durham, England in 1859, and died in London in 1937. His 1888 Viola Sonata bears homage to several German composers (particularly Bach, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms). It was published by Simrock in Berlin, and would have certainly been available to Paul Hindemith, who was born in 1895 and was a violist.

Hindemith started work on his Opus 44 Sonata (his first viola sonata) in 1914, and played the first performance in Frankfurt in 1919.

Here's Ashton's New York Times obituary, (available to Times subscribers), a Wikipedia article about him, and an article by David Wright that mentions Ashton's hatred of originality and progress in music.

I think Ashton, had he knowledge of or interest in the music of the young Hindemith, would have been be pleased with what Hindemith did with his theme (if it was Ashton's to begin with).

Marie Jaëll A minor Sonata transcribed for viola

I didn't think I would be able engrave the massive and complicated piano part of the Jaëll A minor Sonata when I wrote my last post about my viola transcription of the piece. But since I couldn't imagine anyone else taking the initiative to do it, and I feel that it is a substantial addition to the repertoire, I spent the past month facing (and solving) some serious engraving difficulties while I patiently entered the 76-page piano part into Finale. I finished it today, and to celebrate I uploaded the sonata into the IMSLP. It was truly a labor of love. I believe that the piece will win the hearts of other violists as well as the pianists they play with. When we performed it in March that audience liked it too.



Marie Jaëll was born Marie Trautman in Alsace. She studied piano with Ignaz Moscheles, and then with Henri Hertz at the Paris Conservatory, where at sixteen she won a first prize for piano performance. She married the pianist Alfred Jaëll, and the couple set up a salon in Paris. Marie Jaëll was the first pianist to perform all of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in Paris. She wrote piano music, chamber music, vocal music, symphonic poems, concertos, and an opera, and studied composition with Cesar Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns. She was a close friend of Franz Liszt, and Saint-Säens considered her interpretations of Liszt’s music to be definitive. Jaëll wrote her A minor Cello Sonata in 1881, and it was published in Paris in 1886.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP. You can learn more about Marie Jaëll here, and here.