Yesterday afternoon I was listening to the radio while driving to hear my seven-year-old student play a Bach piece at a local beauty pageant. She was the reigning 2018 Little Miss of our town. She won her title last March, and she started playing the violin in September. This was her first public performance. Ever.
There was a person on the radio talking about how the laws of physics showed that there is no past or future, and that in some parts of the universe time could even go backwards. Interesting. This was all spoken over a performance of the Prelude of Bach's Second Cello Suite. I wondered if it was supposed to prove a point about Bach and time or about time and music, but I was disappointed to realize that the Bach just served as background.
Then this person started talking about chaos and order. He said that there are many kinds of chaos, but only one order. He said something about the laws of physics backing up that claim. His example was that if you clean your house it inevitably gets messy again.
He then went on to explain that conditions had to be just right for the big bang to happen as it did, and he mentioned something about the original smoothness of the Earth that I didn't understand. Then he used the word "design," so I then suspected that his argument might have had something to do with trying to put the geological record of the big bang into a religious creationist's worldview.
I tuned him out, and started thinking about the Bach cello suite (another movement from a different cello suite was playing in the background this time) and that the greatest gifts Bach gave to musicians are the many "right" ways his phrases can be played. His music is a gateway to infinite musical possibilities. When we play solo Bach, every experience (musical and non-musical) can inform the way it sounds or feels to play any phrase at any given moment. The counterpoint inside each of our heads while we are playing Bach's pitches and rhythms is always different.
For the Ancient Greeks the word "chaos" meant emptiness, which eventually got translated into the King James Bible as void. It was first used to mean disorder by the 16th-century English satirist Stephen Gosson, and then much later became used to name a branch of mathematics.
When we write music (or anything for that matter) I don't believe that order comes out of chaos in either sense of the word (I don't know enough about mathematics to weigh in on that meaning). There is no "void" because we are living and breathing people with senses, experiences, and ideas. And writing is effectively lining up ideas so that they make sense. I don't think of putting ideas together as creating order out of disorder, though I sometimes create disorder when I put ideas together.
My student played very well. The person doing the announcing introduced her piece as being by Jonathan Sebastian Bach, but very few people in the audience noticed.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Thursday, March 21, 2019
WHAM Concert March 31, 2019
We are playing a viola transcription of a cello sonata by the Slavonian composer Dora Pejačević (1885-1923). It is one of fifty-eight pieces that she wrote in her short lifetime. Pejačevic died a few weeks after the birth of her only child.
The song of the wood thrush (the bird on the concert announcement) is represented in two solo piano pieces by Amy Beach. And the piece of mine that we are playing is a traditional sonata made from interspersing frog songs and songs about frogs.
Monday, March 11, 2019
The Soundscape of Our Late-Boomer Lives
Sometimes I wonder if reruns provide an unconscious soundscape of late-boomer's compositional lives. Could the music for "Star Trek," "Lost in Space," "Bonanza," "Lassie," "Mission Impossible," "F-Troop," "Gilligan's Island," and "I Love Lucy" function the way the songs of birds did for Messiaen, Dvorak, and Sibelius, or pub songs functioned for Brahms?
Past posts from a (still-recovering) CD reviewer
I started thinking, once again, about how rarely I listen to CD recordings and how much I enjoy NOT listening to them in order to write reviews for publication. But then I realized that I have nothing new to say, so I bundled a bunch of posts together from the past ten years or so. Some come from a time when I was still reviewing recordings, and some are from after I stopped. If you ever wonder what might go through the mind of a record reviewer who is also a musician, here's your chance!
Here they are.
Here they are.
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Who is the music for anyway?
I was working with a teenage student on a Handel sonata the other day. While trying to get her to make things musically exciting during periods that did not have fast-moving notes, I mentioned that Handel wrote the piece for her enjoyment and as a vehicle for her to express herself. Of course Handel didn't know my student, but he knew the "audience" for his published music would be musicians looking for music to play with their friends and families. He was writing this music for people just like her.
[I also told her that I think of the notes on the page as my slaves. I can choose the tempo and the spirit. I can line the pitches up they way I want. I can decide which notes are more important, and which notes have less importance. I can also change my mind.]
Lately I have heard teachers try to inspire students to play with expression by telling them that it is their job to project the composer's intentions to the audience. There is nothing really wrong about this way of thinking, but there is something odd about it. People do write music that is concrete and programmatic (Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example). Instructions can be given as text, or pieces can be written in genres with certain expectations (nocturnes, waltzes, marches, lullabies, etc.) Programmatic references are necessary when writing music for opera, ballet, and movies, because the music needs to support what is happening. It also serves as a practical way to maintain the pace of the narrative. I suppose music with a text (a song, a song cycle, or a choral piece) or a tone poem would fall into the programmatic category.
I believe music for the stage is written for the benefit of the audience (as well as the benefit of the composer). A person watching a drama ideally wants to "turn off" the drama in their own lives and "escape" into the drama of the production. Sometimes composers do too.
It is different when the music at hand is not programmatic. When I write non-programmatic music I don't think about the specific emotions I want an audience to feel, but I do think (constantly) about how I want the people playing the music to feel. I want them to feel comfortable expressing themselves, and I want them to feel comfortable interacting with one another. I find that when passages do not sit well on any instrument, a lot of expression is lost, so I strive for physical comfort. I also work to organize the music so that the people who play it remain interested and engaged.
In the case of non-programmatic music, the melodic and harmonic material, tempo indications, rests, slurs, articulations, and dynamics can be written into the music. All the stuff that remains (i.e. the music making itself) belongs to the people playing the music. People listening can decide what to pay attention to. If a performing musician wants to call special attention to something in the music and people in the audience notice, that can be a good thing. Or not.
[Music involves all the senses: the sense of sight in both the mind's eye or the physical eye, the sense of hearing in the anticipatory inner ear or the physical outer ear, and the sense of touch. I think the sense of smell mixes with memory. I remember the smell of the euphonium I played one afternoon in elementary school, the smell of the pitch pipe that my elementary school music teacher gave me as a present, the smell of my flute, and the smell of the closet where I practiced in junior high. I remember the smell of deteriorating music paper, and the cigar-smoke-infused mud floor of the music shed at Tanglewood. I remember the smell of the Tanglewood practice cabins too. I remember the smell of rosin, and the way the inside of my 3/4-size violin case smelled. Taste is musical taste, of course. But it is still a sense.]
We often listen to music to be entertained, and we often play music to entertain ourselves and share with others. If a professional musician has had a lousy day, his or her negative feelings and pesky "self talk" are imperceptible to the audience. Nobody can hear the words that are in your head while you are playing, and nobody who is playing can "hear" the thoughts of the audience. Imagine the distracting extra-musical cacophony that would happen if you could.
But if the chatter in our heads is redirected towards the music at hand, people who are playing together can connect with one another in very intimate and inexplicable ways through the music. In doing so, they also connect with the other people who are in the room, and those people can feel connected with one another in the music.
And, for some people, their inner chatter might slow down. Or even stop.
These are the moments musicians live for. I aspire to write music that makes these moments possible. I imagine a lot of composers share that aspiration.
[I also told her that I think of the notes on the page as my slaves. I can choose the tempo and the spirit. I can line the pitches up they way I want. I can decide which notes are more important, and which notes have less importance. I can also change my mind.]
Lately I have heard teachers try to inspire students to play with expression by telling them that it is their job to project the composer's intentions to the audience. There is nothing really wrong about this way of thinking, but there is something odd about it. People do write music that is concrete and programmatic (Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example). Instructions can be given as text, or pieces can be written in genres with certain expectations (nocturnes, waltzes, marches, lullabies, etc.) Programmatic references are necessary when writing music for opera, ballet, and movies, because the music needs to support what is happening. It also serves as a practical way to maintain the pace of the narrative. I suppose music with a text (a song, a song cycle, or a choral piece) or a tone poem would fall into the programmatic category.
I believe music for the stage is written for the benefit of the audience (as well as the benefit of the composer). A person watching a drama ideally wants to "turn off" the drama in their own lives and "escape" into the drama of the production. Sometimes composers do too.
It is different when the music at hand is not programmatic. When I write non-programmatic music I don't think about the specific emotions I want an audience to feel, but I do think (constantly) about how I want the people playing the music to feel. I want them to feel comfortable expressing themselves, and I want them to feel comfortable interacting with one another. I find that when passages do not sit well on any instrument, a lot of expression is lost, so I strive for physical comfort. I also work to organize the music so that the people who play it remain interested and engaged.
In the case of non-programmatic music, the melodic and harmonic material, tempo indications, rests, slurs, articulations, and dynamics can be written into the music. All the stuff that remains (i.e. the music making itself) belongs to the people playing the music. People listening can decide what to pay attention to. If a performing musician wants to call special attention to something in the music and people in the audience notice, that can be a good thing. Or not.
[Music involves all the senses: the sense of sight in both the mind's eye or the physical eye, the sense of hearing in the anticipatory inner ear or the physical outer ear, and the sense of touch. I think the sense of smell mixes with memory. I remember the smell of the euphonium I played one afternoon in elementary school, the smell of the pitch pipe that my elementary school music teacher gave me as a present, the smell of my flute, and the smell of the closet where I practiced in junior high. I remember the smell of deteriorating music paper, and the cigar-smoke-infused mud floor of the music shed at Tanglewood. I remember the smell of the Tanglewood practice cabins too. I remember the smell of rosin, and the way the inside of my 3/4-size violin case smelled. Taste is musical taste, of course. But it is still a sense.]
We often listen to music to be entertained, and we often play music to entertain ourselves and share with others. If a professional musician has had a lousy day, his or her negative feelings and pesky "self talk" are imperceptible to the audience. Nobody can hear the words that are in your head while you are playing, and nobody who is playing can "hear" the thoughts of the audience. Imagine the distracting extra-musical cacophony that would happen if you could.
But if the chatter in our heads is redirected towards the music at hand, people who are playing together can connect with one another in very intimate and inexplicable ways through the music. In doing so, they also connect with the other people who are in the room, and those people can feel connected with one another in the music.
And, for some people, their inner chatter might slow down. Or even stop.
These are the moments musicians live for. I aspire to write music that makes these moments possible. I imagine a lot of composers share that aspiration.
Wednesday, March 06, 2019
Trade-offs
There's a Yiddish folk story about a couple with six children cramped into a one-room hut. When the father asked the local Rabbi for advice about how to get along in their small space, the Rabbi advised him to bring the family's chickens in the house. When the father complained to the Rabbi the next week that the chickens were not making things better, the Rabbi advised him to bring in the family's cow. The next week the Rabbi told him to let the horse in. This went on for a while. The father was in despair. The Rabbi finally told the father to let the animals out.
The next week the father thanked the Rabbi, and said that his house was now peaceful.
This is how I feel about no longer participating in Facebook. It has been ten weeks since I deleted my account.
I was worried at first that I would miss out on what was going on with our children, but we talk on the phone all the time. I worried that people wouldn't know about the concerts that I was playing. But I always let people know about concerts I'm playing by way of email. I have learned that I don't reach any "new" audiences through Facebook. I have often observed that an "event" on Facebook is often something people may show public interest in, but then they forget about writing down the information, and therefore don't attend.
I was worried that my social world would get smaller. It has. But I'm not unhappy about it. I tend to enjoy the time I spend interacting with people more. I can always reach my friends through email.
The best thing for me is the amount of time I now have to spend doing the things I love to do. Since leaving Facebook I have written some good music (I've shared some of it here), and I have completed the huge project of performing and engraving the Kunc Sonata. I have posted about it here, but somehow it does not feel like careerist self-promotion to post things here. On Facebook it does. I suppose that is because musicians so often use Facebook to promote their careers.
I remember listening to a podcast about musical careerist stuff where the "career advisor" suggested "friending" people on Facebook, and then "unfollowing" them. That way, she advised, people will see you, but you don't need to see them. I have come to understand that this kind of thing happens all the time. I'm interested in relationships that are honest. I like situations where I see you and you see me. I fear Facebook-based interaction is becoming more the norm.
As for careerist aspirations, I have none. I love playing music with my friends and colleagues. I love playing concerts, and I love playing "gigs." I enjoy getting paid when I play with professional musicians, and I enjoy playing for fun with amateur musicians. I enjoy getting paid to write music for people, and I love writing music that I can share in the IMSLP.
My greatest aspiration is for quality, both in my playing and in my writing. Measuring quality in "likes" is terribly unhealthy for me.
It is a trade-off. I suppose that if I worked the social media (and regular media) angles more, I could have more of a "career" as a composer, but I don't want to compromise my time. I want to spend the time I have doing the things I love, not the things I don't like to do.
The next week the father thanked the Rabbi, and said that his house was now peaceful.
This is how I feel about no longer participating in Facebook. It has been ten weeks since I deleted my account.
I was worried at first that I would miss out on what was going on with our children, but we talk on the phone all the time. I worried that people wouldn't know about the concerts that I was playing. But I always let people know about concerts I'm playing by way of email. I have learned that I don't reach any "new" audiences through Facebook. I have often observed that an "event" on Facebook is often something people may show public interest in, but then they forget about writing down the information, and therefore don't attend.
I was worried that my social world would get smaller. It has. But I'm not unhappy about it. I tend to enjoy the time I spend interacting with people more. I can always reach my friends through email.
The best thing for me is the amount of time I now have to spend doing the things I love to do. Since leaving Facebook I have written some good music (I've shared some of it here), and I have completed the huge project of performing and engraving the Kunc Sonata. I have posted about it here, but somehow it does not feel like careerist self-promotion to post things here. On Facebook it does. I suppose that is because musicians so often use Facebook to promote their careers.
I remember listening to a podcast about musical careerist stuff where the "career advisor" suggested "friending" people on Facebook, and then "unfollowing" them. That way, she advised, people will see you, but you don't need to see them. I have come to understand that this kind of thing happens all the time. I'm interested in relationships that are honest. I like situations where I see you and you see me. I fear Facebook-based interaction is becoming more the norm.
As for careerist aspirations, I have none. I love playing music with my friends and colleagues. I love playing concerts, and I love playing "gigs." I enjoy getting paid when I play with professional musicians, and I enjoy playing for fun with amateur musicians. I enjoy getting paid to write music for people, and I love writing music that I can share in the IMSLP.
My greatest aspiration is for quality, both in my playing and in my writing. Measuring quality in "likes" is terribly unhealthy for me.
It is a trade-off. I suppose that if I worked the social media (and regular media) angles more, I could have more of a "career" as a composer, but I don't want to compromise my time. I want to spend the time I have doing the things I love, not the things I don't like to do.
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
Women's History Month
During the month of March people in the press start paying special attention to music written by women. But this March there seems to be a bit more going on than in previous years.
There's an article by Susanna Eastburn in The Guardian that presents the idea of dealing with the problem of underrepresentation by women in the larger landscape of concert programs through gender equality. She runs Sound and Music, the UK's national organization for new music. Sound and Music has made excellent progress, and aims to have 50/50 gender equality in their musical programs by March of 2020.
Things are slowly getting better for living composers who are female. Visibility helps. Orchestras and other musical organizations that take the "risk" of playing music by composers who are contemporary, living, and female show their audiences (and their musicians) that "classical" music is NOT only written by men from Europe who are no longer alive.
These internets are finally buzzing with excitement about Florence Price. There's a review of a Naxos recording with two of her symphonies, and Spotify has thirty tracks on their "Composer Weekly" page for this week. Price is also featured in an excellent New Music USA blog post by Douglas Shadle, which discusses her as both a female composer and an African American composer. Most of all Shadle presents her as a great composer, which she certainly was. Thank goodness her music is now getting performed, recorded, and written about.
These are not "baby steps." They are broad strides that are being taken by men and women that help enrich our musical world.
There's an article by Susanna Eastburn in The Guardian that presents the idea of dealing with the problem of underrepresentation by women in the larger landscape of concert programs through gender equality. She runs Sound and Music, the UK's national organization for new music. Sound and Music has made excellent progress, and aims to have 50/50 gender equality in their musical programs by March of 2020.
Things are slowly getting better for living composers who are female. Visibility helps. Orchestras and other musical organizations that take the "risk" of playing music by composers who are contemporary, living, and female show their audiences (and their musicians) that "classical" music is NOT only written by men from Europe who are no longer alive.
These internets are finally buzzing with excitement about Florence Price. There's a review of a Naxos recording with two of her symphonies, and Spotify has thirty tracks on their "Composer Weekly" page for this week. Price is also featured in an excellent New Music USA blog post by Douglas Shadle, which discusses her as both a female composer and an African American composer. Most of all Shadle presents her as a great composer, which she certainly was. Thank goodness her music is now getting performed, recorded, and written about.
These are not "baby steps." They are broad strides that are being taken by men and women that help enrich our musical world.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Training a New Voice
Very early on in my musical life a singer friend told me that she had to build her vocal instrument in much the way a violin maker builds a violin. There are people who are naturally gifted with beautiful voices, but to make a voice project requires serious training. I have always wondered how trans people who sing (and their teachers) deal with the vocal-instrument-specific changes that happen when taking hormones.
I was so happy to find this article by Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The article includes a clip of the Bass-Baritone Lucia Lucas. She trained as a baritone before going through transition, and was able to keep her voice and her career, now dressing up to play male roles. But I imagine that she has her challenges. I'm planning to read her blog, which I'm linking to here and on the sidebar. I found the post she made about how to learn a role efficiently particularly fascinating.
I was so happy to find this article by Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The article includes a clip of the Bass-Baritone Lucia Lucas. She trained as a baritone before going through transition, and was able to keep her voice and her career, now dressing up to play male roles. But I imagine that she has her challenges. I'm planning to read her blog, which I'm linking to here and on the sidebar. I found the post she made about how to learn a role efficiently particularly fascinating.
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Using a Tablet for Music: 2019 Edition
Nine years ago I wrote a blog post about what I would like to have in an electronic tablet for reading music. You can find the post here. I'm a week into working with my new iPad Pro, and it seems that all my requirements (and more) have been fulfilled. Here's the text of my 2010 post:
Using the Forscore program on my iPad, which I can use in landscape or portrait orientation, I am able to make corrections (in red!) directly on a PDF file, and then I can transfer those corrections into my Finale file. The display is clear, and it is very easy to see the kinds of details that I often miss when working with paper and red pen. Proofing directly in Finale is inadequate because of the tool handles and the colors of the layers.
I have some practical considerations that I would like to share here. I'm only a week into the process, so expect updates!
1. Using a foot pedal to turn pages does have a learning curve. When making a PDF from a Finale (or other notation program) file, it is best to have the ends of the pages in places other than key changes, changes of register, clef changes, and changes of technique (like going from arco to pizzicato).
2. When you use Forscore for playing, the page-turning system doesn't work when the image is blown up to fill the screen completely. Since page margins are not an issue with music that doesn't need to bound, I have reduced my page margins to half an inch (and I guess I could even make them smaller) on either side. I have also increased my page size to as close to 100% as possible, because that makes the notes bigger. And who over the age of 50 doesn't prefer to read larger notes?
3. Use a bold font for fingerings. Maestro 14 point works for me. It does make a difference.
4. Get a soft external case that has a pocket to hold your page-turning foot pedal, so you can keep everything in one place. I even have a little plastic container of AA batteries stuffed in mine.
I was seriously disappointed when I found that the ipad is not capable of turning the orientation of PDF files (like the ones available on the Werner Icking Music Archive or the Petrucci Library) from landscape to portrait. I also found that it is not possible to conveniently turn pages or even conveniently scroll through music.
I'm not holding my breath, but I'm secretly hoping that some very smart music-loving technical person will eventually develop a mac- and windows-friendly music-reader (wouldn't it be appropriate to call it a "notebook?") that would really work for musicians. It wouldn't have as large a potential buying "audience" as the ipad, but it would help a lot of musicians. This is what my machine would require:
1. A screen that can be viewed clearly under all lighting conditions, including strong stage lights. It would need to have a viewing area that would be at least 8.5 x 11. 9 x 12 would be better. CHECK
2. A button on the lower and/or upper right hand side of the machine that would function as a page-turning button. It would need to go in both directions to account for repeats. CHECK
3. A method for annotation (fingerings and bowings) on the downloaded copy (a stylus, perhaps), and the option to save an annotated copy in an easily-accessible format. CHECK
4. It would have to have a very smart and flexible filing system that could organize sheet music into categories: period, genre, instrumentation, etc.CHECK
5. It would have to be silent, like the ipad. CHECK
6. It would have to have the capacity to do e-mail and send attachments, so there would need to be a functional keyboard--either internal or external (I can't stand to type on the ipad touchscreen). CHECK
7. It would need to have a long battery life and would need to be easily recharged. CHECK
8. It would have to be sturdy, but it would have to be light enough to sit on a music stand. CHECK
9. It would have to be affordable for musicians. CHECK
10. Here's my pie-in-the-sky dream for such a machine: it would work as a scanner as well as a reader (hence the ideal larger screen size). CHECK
Using the Forscore program on my iPad, which I can use in landscape or portrait orientation, I am able to make corrections (in red!) directly on a PDF file, and then I can transfer those corrections into my Finale file. The display is clear, and it is very easy to see the kinds of details that I often miss when working with paper and red pen. Proofing directly in Finale is inadequate because of the tool handles and the colors of the layers.
I have some practical considerations that I would like to share here. I'm only a week into the process, so expect updates!
1. Using a foot pedal to turn pages does have a learning curve. When making a PDF from a Finale (or other notation program) file, it is best to have the ends of the pages in places other than key changes, changes of register, clef changes, and changes of technique (like going from arco to pizzicato).
2. When you use Forscore for playing, the page-turning system doesn't work when the image is blown up to fill the screen completely. Since page margins are not an issue with music that doesn't need to bound, I have reduced my page margins to half an inch (and I guess I could even make them smaller) on either side. I have also increased my page size to as close to 100% as possible, because that makes the notes bigger. And who over the age of 50 doesn't prefer to read larger notes?
3. Use a bold font for fingerings. Maestro 14 point works for me. It does make a difference.
4. Get a soft external case that has a pocket to hold your page-turning foot pedal, so you can keep everything in one place. I even have a little plastic container of AA batteries stuffed in mine.
Friday, February 15, 2019
Saturday, February 09, 2019
Speech and Music
I have always that a composer's speaking voice has a huge impact on how s/he writes music. I'm so happy to know that I am not alone!
Friday, February 08, 2019
Jack Benny's Bow Arm
I like to share videos of Jack Benny with my students so that they can observe his beautiful bow arm, and so that they can understand that being able to "play" at being a "lousy" violinist takes a great amount of technique.
I love this performance of the Bach Double that he does with Isaac Stern because he knows how to play with questionable taste (articulation, intonation, rhythm, sound quality) while still playing the violin extremely well. I enjoy the points where Benny lapses into good musicianship.
And just look at his bow arm:
I do with I could hear a recording of him playing in a non-comedic situations. If there were recordings it would probably have been worth his while (for professional reasons) to keep them private.
Jack Benny (née Benjamin Kubelsky) was born in Waukegan, Illinois. The Waukegan Historical Society has an excellent timeline that details events in his life. There is an excellent Wikipedia article about him that mentions Otto Graham Sr. as his teacher. I imagine that Benny must have learned that bow arm from Graham.
I recall either reading or watching an interview with the 70-something Jack Benny where he talked about his love of chamber music and about how he spent his time practicing the violin. I wish I could find it somewhere!
I love this performance of the Bach Double that he does with Isaac Stern because he knows how to play with questionable taste (articulation, intonation, rhythm, sound quality) while still playing the violin extremely well. I enjoy the points where Benny lapses into good musicianship.
And just look at his bow arm:
I do with I could hear a recording of him playing in a non-comedic situations. If there were recordings it would probably have been worth his while (for professional reasons) to keep them private.
Jack Benny (née Benjamin Kubelsky) was born in Waukegan, Illinois. The Waukegan Historical Society has an excellent timeline that details events in his life. There is an excellent Wikipedia article about him that mentions Otto Graham Sr. as his teacher. I imagine that Benny must have learned that bow arm from Graham.
I recall either reading or watching an interview with the 70-something Jack Benny where he talked about his love of chamber music and about how he spent his time practicing the violin. I wish I could find it somewhere!
Wednesday, February 06, 2019
Sanford Sylvan memorials around the blogosphere
I first met Sanford Sylvan when he was a very young man, and I was a teenager. I remember the sound of his gentle speaking voice when he introduced himself to me one afternoon at Tanglewood. I heard him sing later in the week, and became a devoted fan. I have enjoyed hearing him sing in concerts, masterclasses, in stage productions, and on recordings.
Michael we went to a production of "Mother Courage" that was directed by Peter Sellars (at a theater in Boston) for our third date. I was happily surprised to find that Sandy was singing in it. The music for that production was written by Van Dyke Parks, who Michael and I became friends with a couple of decades later.
The musical world is small.
A few people in the musical blogosphere who knew him have been writing posts, so I thought I'd list them here:
Matthew Guerrieri (Soho the Dog) played piano for his masterclasses at the Boston Conservatory, and describes Sandy's clearly professional approach to singing.
Lisa Hirsch (Iron Tongue of Midnight) heard him sing when she was in college. She gives a very touching personal tribute.
Alex Ross (The Rest is Noise) didn't know him personally, but heard him sing Die Winterreise (which comes pretty close).
Robert Hurwitz (Nonesuch Records) produced many of his records.
I'm not surprised that so many of the tributes to Sandy include a link to his recording of "The Monk and His Cat" from Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs." I'll do the same.
Michael we went to a production of "Mother Courage" that was directed by Peter Sellars (at a theater in Boston) for our third date. I was happily surprised to find that Sandy was singing in it. The music for that production was written by Van Dyke Parks, who Michael and I became friends with a couple of decades later.
The musical world is small.
A few people in the musical blogosphere who knew him have been writing posts, so I thought I'd list them here:
Matthew Guerrieri (Soho the Dog) played piano for his masterclasses at the Boston Conservatory, and describes Sandy's clearly professional approach to singing.
Lisa Hirsch (Iron Tongue of Midnight) heard him sing when she was in college. She gives a very touching personal tribute.
Alex Ross (The Rest is Noise) didn't know him personally, but heard him sing Die Winterreise (which comes pretty close).
Robert Hurwitz (Nonesuch Records) produced many of his records.
I'm not surprised that so many of the tributes to Sandy include a link to his recording of "The Monk and His Cat" from Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs." I'll do the same.
Tuesday, February 05, 2019
Kunc Engraving Triumphs
These two measures from the third movement of the Kunc took me more than an hour to "Finaliaze." (I finished a draft of the second movement last night.) I just thought I'd commemorate this little triumph. I had to use all four layers (black, red, green, and blue), and I had to use all sorts of tools to get everything to fit and look right. And they still need a bit of tweaking . . .
. . . And here they are in context (with a few more corrections):
. . . And here they are in context (with a few more corrections):
Saturday, February 02, 2019
Kunc Update!
I'm having a moment of celebration here. The first movement of the Viola Sonata (all 25 pages of it) is now engraved, and I have a PDF file (probably with a few errors) that I would be happy to send to any interested violists. And all violists should be interested . . .
Just send me an email, and I will keep you in the Kunc loop.
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