Vi Hart's September 11th Post "Never Forget"

When I say “never forget”, this is not a statement of will, not a command or a purpose or a political vote. When I hear “never forget”, when I hear it from politicians or see it posted by random strangers, I don’t hear a statement of purpose, egging us on to seek revenge for the secret benefit of greedy motivations. To me, it’s an expression of this thing inside me that has no better name. I will never forget. I couldn’t if I wanted to. And I find it comforting that we have at least some expression of this particular wound that so many share.

Never forget.

I wish we had better words, better actions. I wish I were more comfortable talking about my feelings. I wish I was one of the students who cried in front of the whole class when we heard the live radio coverage, when we heard the first tower go down, and then, unbelievably, unthinkably, the 2nd. I wish I was properly grim when I heard President Obama announce they killed the fucker who did this to us. I was happy. I cheered. I’m glad he’s dead, no matter how little it solves, no matter what my brain thinks about the whole thing.

Never forget.

I understand that many experience today’s 9/11 remembrances as a politicized thing that reminds them only of the worst of what became politically possible in this country following those events. That makes a good deal of sense, and I’m angry about those things too. But cynicism is easy and impresses no one. The fastest way to make a fool of yourself is by mocking someone else’s words because you don’t understand them.

Never forget, never forget, never forget.

Read Vi Hart's whole post here.

A la una yo naci

Every once in a while I become seduced by the Sephardic muse, and I have to make an instrumental setting of a Sephardic melody.

This traditional melody from Sarajevo, which I found in Isaac Levy's 1959 publication Chant Judéo-Espagnols (and first heard performed by Voice of the Turtle), is one of the most alluring songs in the book. The text of the original song translates "I was born at one, at two I grew, at three I took a lover, at four I married. Tell me, young girl, where do you come from? I want to know you. Tell me if you have a lover. If not, I want to love you."



You can listen to a computer-generated recording here, and find the score and parts here and on this page of the IMSLP.

To learn more about Sephardic music and the history of recordings of Sephardic music, visit Sephardic Music: A Century of Recordings.

Kate Wagner Strikes a Familiar Note

This piece from The Baffler is well worth reading. It tells many truths about the business of music.

Here are some more Kate Wagner Baffler pieces, and here is her blog, McMansion Hell.

"Oh show us the way to the next little dollar…”

Oh moon of Alabama! (Just because . . .)

McDonald:



Stratas:



Lenya:



and Lenya again:

The Rewind Episode 9: Ben takes us back to the beginnings of bussing in Boston in 1974

In 1974 I was a ninth grader in a junior high school in Newton, Massachusetts. I don't remember kids from Boston being bussed to my junior high, but I do remember that kids from Boston (I think Dorchester, but I'm not sure) were bussed to my high school. Looking at my 1976 high school yearbook, we had a black student union, which probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for bussing. I had no way of knowing whether my school friends who were black lived in (mostly white) Newton or elsewhere. We were all just high school kids, and it didn't matter. I also had no idea at all that people were opposed to making it possible for schools in communities like mine to be integrated.

But looking through my yearbook with new eyes I can see that the sports teams and clubs in my high school had very few people of color. Maybe kids who rode the bus to school from Boston did not have the opportunity to participate in extra curricular activities, since they had to take a bus home at the end of the school day. There was public transportation, but it was a good 30 minute walk (a mile and a half) to get to the T station, and at least a 30 minute ride to get to Boston.

I am dismayed to see that there was only one person of color on the faculty of my high school (she taught social studies, but I never had her as a teacher). There were also two guidance councilors (one male and one female), and one custodian.

Smell

We mix our senses when we play music. We develop eyes that hear and ears that see. A string player's sense of touch, which would include a sense of space and distance (the distances that our arms move up and down the fingerboard when we shift), follows the dictates of our ears and eyes. But what about the musical associations with our senses of taste and smell? We do have a few commonly-used words in music that make reference to taste, like "dolce," which is Italian for a sweet you eat. When someone plays a note out of tune or with a bad sound, we often refer to those notes as "sour."

There is a body of scholarship concerning taste and music: The Taste of Music, which references Berlioz, and explanations regarding ways that the music you listen to (while you are eating) can change the way your food tastes. There's also a good article in Scientific American. I suppose for those of us who make the music we listen to ourselves, we can make musical choices that are in either good taste or bad taste.

Smell is complicated. People who have synesthesia can have hard-wired (from early childhood, I suppose) associations between sound and smell. Could you imagine what it would be like to have specific smell associations with pitches the way people with absolute pitch and synesthesia have specific color associations with pitches? If we experience more than one smell at a time, having that condition would bring the impact of dissonant harmonies to a whole new level.

If I feel a fugue coming in a piece of music I am hearing for the first time, I have been known to say, "I smell a fugue." I don't do it with my nose, of course, but I do it with the wealth of musical experience I have stored in my unconscious memory. Physical smell can surround us immediately. It can evoke memories. It can repel us. It can compel us. It can repulse us. It can move into the background, and we can become temporarily immune to it after a while. Sometimes we don't even know when it has gone away. (I lost my sense of smell once, and wrote about it here.) But smell that is not physical, i.e. the memory of smell, or the memory of a memory of a smell is something that "smells" musical to me.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to share a passage from one of the chapters (Chapter 43, to be exact) that Robert Musil withdrew from the original publication of The Man Without Qualities. It captures, in a most striking way, the illusive quality of the smelling part of the imagination.

The repulsion was perhaps reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it might smell in a grandmotherly, cloying way of medicines and ointments; and old-fashioned and unmanly ghosts, fixated with unpleasant maliciousness upon human suffering, were hovering within its walls. Agathe sniffed. And although the air held nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further backward by her feelings, until she remembered the rather anxious "smell of heaven," that aroma of incense half aired and emptied of its spices which clung to the scarves of the habits her teachers had once worn when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious convent school without at all succumbing to piety herself. For as edifying as this odor may be for people who associate it with what is right, its effect on the hearts of growing, worldly-oriented, and resistant girls consisted in a vivid memory of smells of protest, just as ideas and first experiences were associated with a man's mustache or with his energetic cheeks, pungent with cologne and dusted with talc. God knows, even that odor does not deliver what it promises! And as Agathe sat on one of Lindner's renunciative upholstered chairs and waited, the empty smell of the world closed inescapably about her with the empty smell of heaven like two hollow hemispheres, and an intimation came over her that she was about to make up for a negligently endured class in the school of life.

In the original German:

Das Abweisende mochte dabei vielleicht an die gefrorene Steifheit von Kreidezeichnungen erinnern, doch sah das Zimmer auch aus, als röche es großmütterhaft verzärtelt nach Arznei und Salbe und es schwebten altmodische und unmännliche, mit unangenehmer Geflissentlichkeit auf das menschliche Leiden gerichtete Geister in dem Raum. Agathe schnupperte. Und obwohl die Luft nichts als ihre Einbildungen enthielt, sah sie sich von ihren Gefühlen nach und nach weit zurückgeführt und erinnerte sich nun an den bänglichen »Geruch des Himmels«, jenen halb entlüfteten und seiner Würze entleerten, an den Tuchen der Sutanen haften gebliebenen Weihrauchduft, den ihre Lehrer einst an sich getragen hatten, als sie ein Mädchen war, das gemeinsam mit kleinen Freundinnen in einem frommen Institut erzogen wurde und keineswegs in Frömmigkeit erstarb. Denn so erbaulich dieser Geruch auch für Menschen ist, die das Richtige mit ihm verbinden, in den Herzen der heranwachsenden weltlich-widerstrebenden Mädchen bestand seine Wirkung in der lebhaften Erinnerung an Protestgerüche, wie sie Vorstellung und erste Erfahrungen mit dem Schnurrbart eines Mannes oder mit seinen energischen, nach scharfen Essenzen duftenden und von Rasierpuder überhauchten Wangen verbinden. Weiß Gott, auch dieser Geruch hält nicht, was er verspricht! Und während Agathe auf einem der entsagungsvollen Lindnerschen Polsterstühle saß und wartete, schloß sich nun der leere Geruch der Welt mit dem leeren Geruch des Himmels unentrinnbar um sie zusammen wie zwei hohle Halbkugeln, und eine Ahnung wandelte sie an, daß sie im Begriff sei, eine unachtsam überstandene Lebensschulstunde nachzuholen.

Restoring Executive Order

My thoughts have veered away from things musical today, and I feel the need to share them.

After exploring a personal "cone of uncertainty" concerning how large and powerful the hurricanes that will hit the Caribbean and the Eastern United States NEXT September will be, I hope that the powers that have the means to control decisions about preserving what we can of our fragile planet do something soon. Our projected cone of uncertainty concerning the influence of our current US administration (on the whole world) might indeed end on January 21, 2020.

Here are examples of executive orders I'm hoping for that day:

Have a mandatory buy-back of all assault weapons, and make it illegal to own, sell, buy, or store them. Do the same with ammunition. Create an industry to safely repurpose the materials (you know, like plowshares). That creates lots of jobs.

Expand climate change research exponentially. Hire experienced scientists to investigate science fairs, "go fund me" and "kickstarter" applications of technology that wish to study ways of getting extra carbon out of the atmosphere. Put organizations in competition with one another. Give the initiative a date and a mandate, like we had for the genome project.

Mandate that corporations that make over a certain amount of money (you know, in the multi-billions and multi-trillions) to direct a significant portion of their profit (in the way of a tax) to the (above mentioned) effort to find solutions. Join the rest of the world in this effort, and get every corporation in the world to participate.

Mandate investment in renewable energy.
Reward investment in renewable energy.

Success

I decided, for the third (and probably last) time, I guess, that twitter is not for me. The first true downward turn of my stomach happened when I saw a tweet by a twitter-active musician that read (and I paraphrase), "Success is not something that happens. It is something you have to go after." S/he clearly made this tweet without irony. I have never thought of success as something to go after and eventually achieve.

From my vantage point at the beginning of my seventh decade of being a human being, I can only think of spending my time trying to do my best work for the sake of doing the work as well as I can. If I feel that I have done good work on any given day, I have had success. If I have helped a student overcome an obstacle in a lesson, I have had success. If, while practicing, I find a fingering or bowing that works for a difficult passage, I have had success. If I play in a way that I feel expresses the way I want a phrase of music to go, I have had success. If I can accompany a violin or viola student on the piano and give ninety percent of my attention to the student (playing piano is still difficult for me), I have had success.

If I make it through another Haydn quartet with my ensemble of chamber music novices, we have achieved success. If I have solved a problem in a piece I am writing, I have achieved success. If I finish a piece and still like it when the process of writing is done, I have succeeded. If someone enjoys playing something I have written or arranged, I feel honored to have contributed to the possibility of their musical success. If somebody needs a piece of music for a particular ensemble or occasion and I have made it easily available to them, we have all succeeded.

If my students remain excited about music, I have succeeded in teaching them by example. If the musical community in my small and rural corner of the world becomes richer because of the work I do, I have succeeded in my quest to make the musical world I encounter a better place, one note at a time.

Related posts: Ambition, Humility

The Rewind Episode 8: Ben takes us to a 1967 draft card "burn in" at the Arlington Street Church in Boston.

The Enigmatic Henri Eccles

"Just you wait, Henri Eccles, just you wait."

This was a household joke thirty-seven-odd years ago, back in the days when my father and his wife, Susan Miron, used to perform their viola and harp transcription of the "Eccles" sonata.

We know very little about Henri Eccles (also known as Henry Eccles). His father, Solomon Eccles (also known as Solomon Eagle), was a violinist and composer who burned all of his compositions when he became a Quaker in order to distance himself from the church music of the middle 17th century. Henri's older brother John (1668-1735) was a composer for the theater in London, and as Master of the Kings Musick he served William III, Queen Anne, and King George I and II.

Henri Eccles, who left London for Paris, published two sets of sonatas for violin and continuo, one in 1720 and the other in 1723. In a 1923 letter to the Musical Times, the British music scholar and critic W. Barclay Squire noted that Eccles appropriated 18 movements of 1720 set from works by Giuseppi Valentini and Francesco Antonio Bonporti.

The G minor Sonata is the eleventh sonata of the 1720 set, and if we take account of Mr. Squire’s observations, it may not have been written by Mr. Eccles. Still, this charming, catchy, and probably pilfered piece of Italian loveliness has remained in the repertoire of violinists, violists, double bass players, and cellists for centuries, making Henri Eccles a household name.

Look at the second movement of this 1713 Bonporti Sonata. Eccles might have supplied the continuo realization (see the link below for the 1720 publication), but he clearly lifted the violin line from Bonporti.



Given this pedigree of pilferage, I had to arrange it for string orchestra. There are copyist errors in the 1720 publication which are pretty easy to spot. It served me well as a basis for this arrangement. I hope that people will enjoy playing it and listening to it.



You can listen to it here, and get the score and parts here.

The music will also be available on this page of the IMSLP.

Peter Maxwell Davies Eight Songs for a Mad King

Peter Maxwell Davies, best known in recent decades for his lovely Farewell to Stromness, used to write music that was far from lovely. It was music that depicted insanity.

I first heard this piece performed at Tanglewood when I was a teenager, and I was able to talk about it (and many other things musical) with the composer. Knowing Max as I did, I believe he would want me to post this video (complete with score) here since we are (and not just those of us living in the US) faced with the presence of a world leader who acts like a mad king.



Here's another fantastic performance of the piece where you can see the masked musicians playing, and you can follow the text with subtitles. You can watch a discussion between Kelvin Thomas and Michael McCarthy about the piece here.

Here's a Wikipedia article about the piece, and, for the sake of comparison, we can see that George III was no match for Trumposaurus Rex (T-Rex!) in the madness department. The current US president even makes Peter the Great look like a statesman.

Ben shares a 1974 interview with a Boston-based suffragette with us

Unfairness, Competition, and Self-doubt

I really enjoy reading the posts that young musicians put on Reddit. It almost makes up for the lost art of commenting in the blogosphere. The anonymous nature of the posts and replies makes it very different from the other social media forums I know where people discuss musical matters.

Musicians usually do not go onto Reddit looking for praise for the things that they are doing in their musical lives (like they do on Facebook), but many are looking for affirmation of their abilities. Many are young people looking for some kind of support from people outside of their regular musical lives (people other than their peers and teachers). High school can be a competitive musical place. So can college. People are often evaluated unfairly, and everyone is worried about having some kind of future in music, particularly if music is their major.

I remember the unfairness. I remember the competition. I remember the sense of self doubt that permeates during early adulthood and festers throughout later adulthood.

I can't do anything in my adult life about unfairness except to do my best to be fair. And I actually think that competition among students can be a positive thing, so I don't discourage it. Nobody was better, smarter, more fearless, or more imaginative, in my experience, than the musicians I grew up with. I imagine that for most adults nobody looms as large as their contempoary childhood heroes.

When I was young I thought I was the only person who lived with a high degree of self doubt. Everyone at Juilliard seemed confident about how good they were. They talked about it all the time, and they demonstrated it in the way they played. The people who had teachers who berated them rose to the occasion and used the experience as a way to become stronger. I kind of envied those people, because my teacher, Julius Baker, never berated anyone. He also never told me what I needed to do in order to improve. He always said that I needed to find my own way.

When I told my friend Seymour Barab this, he said that he never knew that Julius Baker was such a good teacher. I could not agree. I believe that the job of a teacher of conservatory students is to teach students how to be better at playing their instruments and to help them grow as musicians.

At one point I was considering leaving Juilliard. My friends at Juilliard who had been to regular college seemed so much happier and smarter than I was at the time. My father, having seen my SAT scores, advised me to continue at Juilliard.

One day I asked my teacher if he thought I had any talent. I asked him because he always talked about how talented the other students were, but never seemed to care about what I was doing. The only way I could learn from him was to study the way he played, and try to intuit his thoughts when he taught other students during the lesson time that I thought was meant for me. I had to clear the afternoon to get a lesson, and I spent most of those afternoons listening to other students play.

My teacher's response to my question was, and I can quote, "You will say that Julius Baker gave you the best advice of your life. Go see a psychiatrist."

I took his advice immediately. I hauled myself down to the school's office, and I got a referral to a psychiatrist, one Dr. Richard Kopff (!!!) who saw Juilliard students. I had to have a diagnosis made up so that my father's insurance would cover it, so I was treated under the generic label "anxiety nervosa."

My sessions consisted of me coming in and talking about my teacher not showing up for lessons. Dr. Kopff did ask me about family things occasionally, and, since I was a young person, there was a certain amount of drama in my life to talk about. But I was pretty sure that Dr. Kopff assumed the reason my teacher didn't show up at lessons or teach me was because I didn't have any talent. I know this because I invited Dr. Kopff to come to a recital I played, after which the whole direction of our therapy changed.

I suppose the experience taught me that I did indeed have business staying in music, I didn't need a psychiatrist, and that my teacher's lack of interest in teaching me had nothing to do with my talent or lack of talent. Fortunately, during the course of my therapy (but not as a result of it) I found two friend-teachers (a flutist and a cellist) who were more than willing to make up for my teacher's inadequacy (out of the kindness of their hearts--no money was ever involved).

I believe both of them were "paying forward" musical kindnesses. I know I was extremely fortunate, and I continue to express my gratitude for what they did for me by doing what I can to help other musicians.

I actually have found my own way, but, thanks to Julius Baker, it is as a composer and as a string player who keeps a blog rather than as a flutist. I have found my own way the hard way. I am much happier now than I could ever have imagined being when I was a young adult, but it came as a result of building up my musical life from scratch ten years after graduating from Juilliard.

I did stay in touch with Julius Baker after leaving Juilliard, and I sent a tape of my violin playing to him a year or two after I started playing. He called me up to ask me why I was playing the violin. I explained why, and he said, "But you were such a good flutist." Too little too late, I say.

Leonard Rose and Leonid Hambro in 1951

My friend Danny Morganstern pointed me to this FANTASTIC recital recording from 1951, and now I'm sharing it with you. There's so much to love here.



Beethoven Sonata in D Major, Opus 102, No. 2
Debussy Sonata
Kodály Sonata, Opus 4
Brahms Sonata in F Major, Opus 99

I didn't know the Kodaly (it's not the famous solo sonata), so I enjoyed listening to the score, which you can find here.

Nuit de Vielle

You can find the score and parts on this page of the IMSLP. And you can listen to a computer-generated recording here. The percussive flute sounds on the computer-generated recording are only an approximation. Hopefully I will have a humanly-generated recording to post soon!