Paulo Bellinati Jongo and Lira Brasileira

Out-of-Body Experiences with Bach

Someone posed a question on Reddit wondering if anyone had "out-of-body" experiences playing Bach.

So this one time in a rehearsal space I was playing Bach's Cello Suite #1 in G Major on the marimba.

I had been rehearsing it for weeks, thinking constantly about how I felt about the piece and what it meant to me in order to put my very own emotional spin on it. I probably played it at least 20 times a day for three weeks. I started the piece for the umpteenth time that practice session... and then when I finished I came out of some weird trance or something: I had no memory of playing the piece, but I did have a... well, like a vast and empty, yet fulfilled, place inside of me. I remember knowing that I had played well, but that's it. It was a weird experience, and I'm still not sure what happened.

The best way to describe it would be from Matilda by Roald Dahl "It made me feel lovely,' Matilda said. 'For a moment or two I was flying past the stars on silver wings."

In my conversations with other Bach players this does not seem to be an uncommon experience. So I'm here because I've finally built up the courage to ask these weird questions here:

What are your out-of-body experiences with playing Bach?

What is it about Bach that facilitates these experiences in our brains? Is music math, and math music? Is there truly music in the spheres? Or is it just that repetition encourages deep meditation? Let's talk!

But mostly I want stories about 'going somewhere else' while you were playing Bach. DAE?

I thought I'd share my response here:

My question is how do you tell an out-of-body experience from an in-body experience? Bach is my "go to" when I have feelings I cannot otherwise process. My mind can follow the pathways and accept their logical (and often surprising) destinations. The process of following them helps me to feel clearer about taking whatever next step I need to in any given situation. His choices bring me satisfaction.

There are moments in Bach pieces I heard my father playing while I was growing up that bring me "right back" to a moment and a physical place in my childhood. There are pieces of Bach that generate almost a "taste" in my mouth (Cantata 78 is one). There are pieces of Bach that do the opposite of an "out of body" thing for me. They make me feel more physically grounded, more comfortable in my skin, more able to move, and more secure.

I would not say that Bach is "music of the spheres" because I believe that Bach draws upon things that are very physical. The way Bach feels under the hand, the way it feels to sing Bach, and the way his long phrases are like physical constructions make me venerate Bach for his deep humanity.

I play Bach every day. Since I play viola, I alternate between the Sonatas and Partitas and the Cello Suites. My daily routine involves the reward of playing Bach after I play my scales. And for a while (maybe a year or so) I was going through the WTC on a daily basis. These days when I have time at the keyboard I have been playing the Partitas.

Pierre Kunc

In addition to the Viola Sonata by Algernon Ashton, John David Moore and I will be playing Pierre Kunc's Viola Sonata on our January 20th concert. We got hold of the music purely by accident. John David requested something from interlibrary loan, and the Kunc Sonata came in its place. I like to think that a savvy librarian knew that we would like the piece and that we would perform it. That librarian was right!

There is close to nothing written about Pierre Kunc in English, but I did come across a French webpage dedicated to Kunc. I brushed aside the huge number of names dropped in this article, and learned that Pierre Kunc was the third of twelve children who were part of one of the most important musical families in France. He had several celebrated teachers, including his parents and the violinists Paul Viardot (the son of Pauline Viardot), and Charles de Beriot (the husband of Pauline Viardot's sister Maria Malibran).


[The Kunc family in 1905]

In spite of being overshadowed by his younger brother, Aymé, who won the Grand Prize in the 1902 Prix de Rome, Pierre Kunc had a great deal of success in France. From 1899 until 1925 he taught piano and organ at the Ecole Sainte-Genevieve in the rue Lhomond in Paris, and he held several important organ positions including one at Notre-Dame of Bercy in Paris and one at Saint-Suplice, which was also in Paris. He also served as the choirmaster at the Monte Carlo Opera, and in 1909 the Institute de France gave him the Prix Trémont. His work has fallen into obscurity because so little of his music was published. This Viola Sonata and his Rapsodie, also written for viola and piano, were Pierre Kunc’s only pieces of chamber music to see publication.

Kunc wrote his Viola Sonata for Paul-Louis Neuberth to play on his “Viola Alta,” a nearly 19-inch viola with proportions more like that of the violin. The instrument was developed in the 1870s and was abandoned (probably because of its unwieldly size) in the early 1920s. The work was completed in 1921, and Neuberth gave the first performance in 1922 with the pianist Rachel Blanquer.

I made a new edition of the viola part and uploaded a PDF into the IMSLP. After this concert I will start the piano part, which I hope to have completed by March or April. My hope is that our performance will be the first of many!

Exploring New Musical Worlds!

Since leaving Facebook I have been exploring new online musical worlds. As a result of my exploration I have found treasure troves of musical discussions through reddit. Some of those wise musicological voices that used to comment here in the blogosphere seem to have migrated to the classical music groups there. Reddit reminds me of the usergroups that I used to take part in before the blogosphere was invented.

I enjoy reading posts from young people, people new to "classical music," and people with questions that provoke interesting answers. It is, as far as I can tell, a "place" where discussion is both anonymous and civil. I'm still learning my way around this new way of using the internets.

I happened upon an intriguing subreddit today:

I love the repeat sign graphic in the upper lefthand corner, and if you look down at the bottom left you will see a sharp sign and a flat sign that replace the usual up arrow and down arrow (which allows users to anonymously up-vote or down-vote a post). Very clever. The name of the subreddit is also appropriate because it improves upon "100 days of practice" meme that young musicians use to keep themselves motivated.

Anyone learning to play an instrument knows that a mere hundred days of practicing is not going to get you very far on a journey towards proficiency. One thousand days of consistent practice is a healthy commitment.

(And a nice hello to anyone arriving at this blog through links I have put on reddit!)

Algernon Ashton

John David and I are playing a concert later this month that will include Algernon Ashton's Viola Sonata.



Algernon Bennett Langton Ashton was born in Durham, England in 1859, and moved to Leipzig with his family at the age of four. At the suggestion of Ignaz Moscheles, Ashton entered the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied with Carl Reinecke, Ernst Richter, Salomon Jadassohn, Benjamin Papperitz, and Theodor Coccius. He graduated in 1879, and entered the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt where he studied with Joachim Raff. Ashton settled in London, and taught piano at the Royal College of Music from 1885 until 1910. He died in 1937.

In addition to being a prolific composer, Ashton kept a 58-volume daily diary. He was famous for finding graves of distinguished people and writing letters to the Musical Times to comment on the condition of the gravestones. These letters were published in two volumes by Chapman & Hall (Truth Wit and Wisdom, and More Truth Wit and Wisdom), but his diaries were lost.

Ashton's 160 published works include four cello sonatas, three violin sonatas, two piano quintets, eight piano sonatas, works for choir, songs, salon pieces, and fantasie pieces. Many of his unpublished works, including 24 piano sonatas, one in each key of the chromatic scale, 24 string quartets, and four symphonies are believed to have been destroyed when German bombs hit his family home during the Blitz.

Here's a link to his Fourth Piano Sonata, Opus 164 and a link to one of his Phantasiestucke, Opus 12.

Lost Boundaries: Movie Recommendation

Michael and I were extremely impressed by Alfred L. Werker's 1949 film Lost Boundaries. I offer no spoilers, just a sincere recommendation and a YouTube link. The music, written by the Canadian film composer Louis Applebaum (1918-2000), is exceptional.



Applebaum also wrote terrific music for Werker's 1952 Walk East on Beacon

Dan Golding's Video about Film Music

I learned a great deal about film music from watching this, so I thought I'd share it here:

New Year's Greeting for Three

As is my custom, I have been spending this earlier part of New Year's Eve writing a short piece to greet the new year. This one is a bit austere, but it really can't be helped.

Here's a link to an audio file (with yours truly playing the violin part and the oboe part on the violin), and a link to the music (which is also on this page of the IMSLP).

"The Collar" Performed by Barbara Hedlund and Ronald Hedlund

Here's a link to the score.

Music Holder "Life Hack" Number 2

In 2011 I made a post about using a 15-inch laptop sleeve as a music holder. Though my laptop sleeves have served me well, they do not work for larger pieces of music. I tried looking for a larger laptop sleeve, but I couldn't stand the smell of the only larger neoprene sleeve I found on line (perhaps more are available now that don't smell). After a few days of letting the neoprene sleeve outgas, I tried washing it. It still smelled terrible, so I threw it away.

I searched around the house in search of a better solution, and happened upon a set of "Skylite" packing cubes (which are actually rectangles) that I bought for (literally) a few dollars at Aldi. It turned out that the largest sleeve would fit the 10 by 13 piece of music that I needed to cart around. I safety-pinned the sleeve to the inside of my inside of my case cover, where it keeps all my music contained, safe, and supported.

A Dictionary of Musical Themes

I found this amazing 1948 musical reference book (published in New York by Crown) in a used bookstore in Champaign, Illinois several months ago. The songwriter Harold Barlow and the composer Sam Morgenstern sought to make a musical parallel to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. This volume contains 10,000 themes from orchestral and chamber music. Barlow and Morgenstern made a volume of vocal themes in 1950, and in 1962 they made a volume of opera and song themes.



You can buy copies all over the place on line. Mine is a first edition without a dust cover, and I paid $10 for it.

You can read the introductory material for the book here.

La Soleá from Cante Jondo played by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

This is the fourth piece "Cante Jondo" (five pieces based on poems of Federico Garcia Lorca) performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning.



Here is Michael Leddy's translation Lorca's "La Soleá"

Sad Andalusian Song

Cloaked in black
she thinks the world small
and the heart immense.

Cloaked in black.

She thinks the tender sigh and cry
disappear
in the wind.

Cloaked in black.

She left the window open
and dawn emptied out
the whole sky there.

Ah, ah,
cloaked in black!

Organizing my Musical Assumptions

I have been doing a bit of housekeeping of late, and have decided to use the nifty labels tool to organize some of my older posts into categories. It feels kind of like taking books out of boxes and putting them on shelves. You can see the labels I have made on the sidebar to the right.

You can also line up all the rambles I have collected (so far) by clicking here.

Happy rambling!

Mnozil Brass Antics from 2011

One of my middle-school students told me about this video, so I thought I'd share it here. It's set to start where the actual auction begins. I imagine that this is being enjoyed, especially today, this final day of the semester, by middle-school band kids everywhere.



This might have drawn inspiration from this single-cello and multiple-player Bolero video from 2006.

Musical Economics Ramble

I was working with a seven-year-old student the other day, and while we were discussing the weight of the bow on the string, the subject of gravity came up. My student told me that they studied gravity in Kindergarten, and that in first grade they were now learning about economics. Maybe it's a fancy way of talking about money: dividing dollars into quarters, dimes, and nickels, which could be useful when introducing physical concepts of math. It is interesting and amusing to consider various scenarios of costs and benefits through the eyes of a first grader.

Anyway, I have been thinking about musical economics lately.

Most of the people reading this blog know that I stopped working with commercial publishers years ago, and since 2006 I have made everything that that I have written available by way of the IMSLP. It's free to download and free to perform. It simply isn't worth my while to work through a publisher and not be able to distribute the music I write for free. The IMSLP makes it possible for me to participate in the exchange of music without dealing with ideas of ownership or money. I am also very fortunate that being married to a now retired academic professional, and living in a place that has an extremely low cost of living, I don't have to sell music to pay the bills. If I were a different kind of person I could even say that I had a "patron." Anyway, the quality of what I write would remain the same regardless of whether I were to exchange it for money or offer it to musicians for free.

But everything you read tells you that nothing is really free.

If I perform the prelude from a Bach Cello Suite (and we violists practice them all the time and perform them occasionally) it is a reflection of thousands of hours of concentrated practice. The "cost" to me is the time I have spent building up enough technique to allow me to shepherd the groups of notes into formations that please me and please the people listening to me. If I play a Bach Prelude for a wedding and get paid money for doing so, that money hardly compensates for the time I have spent hard at work on the piece. It does, however, compensate for my travel and for the time I spend sitting quietly during a wedding ceremony.

The benefit for Bach is negligible. He has been dead for a long time, and his name and his work is well known. But there might be someone at that wedding who has never heard a Bach prelude before. There might be a child (or even an adult) who thinks that the viola is the most beautiful instrument she has ever heard, and will want to play it. There might be a person or two who is better able to connect to appropriate feelings for the event because of the safety of the music.

But being hard at work is really being hard at play for me. And all that work (play) makes me a better musician. I imagine Bach would have been happy to know that his music has proven useful after all these years.

And what are the economics relating to a person (or group) playing music that I write? The cost for the player is measured in hours of practice time and rehearsal time, and the benefit is having new music to play. The major benefit for me is having the music I write "live" in other places besides the inside of my head. I also know that most musicians are poorly paid for their work. It brings me no joy to think about musicians as customers. It does bring me joy to know that people who might not be able to afford music for their students to play (school orchestra budgets being limited) can find new music to perform without spending money they do not have.

The costs of creating a publishing company are the similar to the costs of setting up any small business. You need space for production (including large-format printing equipment and binding equipment) and supplies (high-quality paper and ink). You have to either understand accounting or hire an accountant, have a professional website, set yourself up to do e-commerce, and protect your intellectual property. You might need to hire a lawyer to help with those protections, if need be. You have to understand business, advertise, go to conferences, and be ever-present on Facebook (gasp) and Twitter. The expenditures you have to make will be reflected in the price of the music so that you actually make some money from owning the publishing company. And that price might be higher than it would be from a larger publisher.

The company that handles my published music is now offering services to self-publishing composers (i.e. composers who do not have a relationship with an established publisher and would like to sell their music). In exchange for a yearly fee, they will print and mail your music, and list it on their website. Unlike the non-self-published composers (like me) they allow the composer to retain ownership of the music (saving themselves the expense of filing for copyright).

The publisher takes a hefty percentage (45%) of the money that customers pay in retail sales (that's less than the 90% that they take from the composers they publish). The company also will sell self-publishing composers copies of their own music at a 70% discount. I suppose that the company thinks of would-be self-publishing composers as customers rather than as people who produce items of value. I suppose that adding this new "consumer class" of composer elevates me up a tier in the company's hierarchy, though I still can't imagine ever seeing this company actively promoting my work.

So I keep sending my new work to the IMSLP, where it can be accessed by people everywhere who are looking for music to play. It costs me nothing and it benefits anyone who is interested. And it leaves me time to write music. And blog posts.