What Sibelius Drank

There's a lot to learn about Jean Sibelius! You can enter his world (and liquor cabinet) through this link.

My Transcription of the Bach Fifth Cello Suite is FINISHED!

You can find the score and parts of the transcription here, and listen to a computer-generated recording here, and in a day or two it will be on this page of the IMSLP.

For reference, here's a facsimile of the first page of a manuscript in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach. You can find out more about the piece and see the whole manuscript here.

Transcribing the Prelude of the Fifth Cello Suite for String Quartet

Making a setting of the prelude of the first Bach cello suite was easy. Making a quartet setting of the prelude for the third suite was not easy, but it was exciting, and the adventure and discovery propelled me forward and gave me energy. Making a quartet setting of the sixth suite was daunting and difficult, but it was ultimately rewarding.

Now I sit in the middle of the one-voice fugue of the fifth suite, and feel like I'm scaling the highest part of a mountain (using ropes). The deeply expressive prelude part of the prelude and fugue that begins the piece is finished (that would be the lower part of the mountain, filled with wild animals and lots of vines). I could only do a few measures of it at a sitting, but I sat often and long, and I took breaks.

I'm 60 measures into the Fugue (there are somewhere around 200 more, at least, to go). It's dangerous territory. I had a look at how Schumann accompanied it, and he safely reinforced the harmony during the eighth notes and avoided adding counterpoint. I'm not doing that.

Wish me luck.

Conducting Myself

I rely on conductors all the time, and I appreciate what playing with a good one can accomplish. But, even though I have "studied" conducting (I took one conducting course in graduate school), I have never had occasion to use my "skills." Perhaps I should say that I have actively avoided situations when conducting was involved, particularly when it involves conducting music that I have written. I much prefer to be in the orchestra or in the audience.

Our usual conductor wasn't around for last night's Summer Strings rehearsal, and all efforts to bamboozle other people into conducting failed, so it fell upon me to conduct. I knew the scores really well, since I had made the arrangements we were playing. I had fun marking them with colored pencils and figuring out ways to rehearse problem spots.

There was really nothing to fear, except for my fear of total inadequacy because of a complete lack of technique.

But I was among friends. I took stuff apart to show how the dialogues and textures worked, and soon everybody (including me) started to relax and have fun. And people started paying attention to the stuff happening in the music outside of their part, and things started to sound truly beautiful. It was a great rehearsal, and I felt exhilarated. I'm still exhilarated.

I used to wonder why anyone would want to be a conductor. Now I understand why. It's a chance to use gesture to shape musical lines and allow (somehow) people to connect with one another musically. Ultimately it is a way to break down (as long as the music lasts) the barriers that exist between people, and allow them to express themselves totally while depending upon and fortifying their ensemble-mates.

Love is fragile, and expressing it in ways other than through music for me is risky. It seems that the only expressions of extra-musical love that don't involve risk involve being with an intimate partner in a trusting environment, expressing love to a family member or close friend, or expressing love to a baby, where you sound like a blithering idiot, but don't care.

Fortunately everyone comes to Summer Strings because they love music. And there was a lot of love last night, even if I totally lack the technique and drive to ever consider being a "real" conductor.

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!"