Holiday Music, and Music in General

Michael and I have been living in what could be called the "buckle of the bible belt" for a third of a century. When we arrived I was welcomed with open arms by the small (but not as small as it is now) Jewish community, but in the larger community, being Jewish had the distinction of being "other." At one point when we had half a dozen children from Jewish families in the public schools, one family put pressure on one of the elementary schools to include a Hannukah song in its Christmas program. Who did they choose for a soloist? Our son.

Since adolescence I have had difficulty with Christianity. It invaded my family of origin, and ultimately tore it apart. After I left my adolescent home for Juilliard, I lived in an apartment with born-again Christian roommates who held prayer meetings in the apartment; and they prayed for my conversion. That didn't help things at all. Then I got married and moved to a small town in downstate Illinois.

Living in a Christianity-dominated community for more than half of my life has had its challenges, but it has become my home. The community has changed during the past three decades. There are some things that are worse, and there are some things that are better. Members of the musical community (school-age kids and adults) used to be mostly university professors, spouses of university professors (like me), or children of university professors (like our kids). Now only one of my students is in a family that is connected with the university. Forty-some-odd years ago the string program in the public schools was discontinued. The public schools still don't have a string program, but we have private teachers who have built a string program that is not connected with the school system.

In our little world the making of music seems to be seeping away from academia into the community (where I believe it belongs).

One of my students told me that they were doing a Hanukkah song for their elementary school chorus concert. It had a violin part, and her music teacher was wondering if my student could learn it. I know for a fact that there are no Jewish kids in the school (or in any school in the area), and there are no parents vying for representation during the holidays. It seems that as our community is becoming more racially and culturally diverse, it is also becoming open to more musical possibilities.

[When I think of that time in the grocery store when the father of a family of string players asked me how I felt about playing Christian music during this time of year (I was too shocked at his question to respond at the time), I realize that our musical community (and its parents) has also grown. No parent of a string student would ever ask me such a question now. Now they give me Hanukkah cards with words of thanks for teaching their kids.]

This part of the country is divided politically, and you can imagine the dominant political worldview is a republican one. I am pretty sure that the majority of people I teach, make music with, and write music for have a different political mindset from the one I have. But I will never know for sure because we NEVER TALK ABOUT POLITICS!

Music is a safe haven from all that is happening in the outer world. It is a safe place for people to make the kind of vital connections that we need in order to feel like human beings. I believe it always has been, and hope that it always will be.



This ensemble, made of people of all ages and abilities (for two of my students this was their very first concert), had about two hours of rehearsal time for this concert ('tis the season of snow interfering with plans to rehearse). The program included a Hanukkah song: the string version of my own "Hanukkah Latkes," which you can listen to here, if you like. Everybody enjoyed playing it.

Charleston Consort Concert Sunday, December 22

The Charleston Consort will be playing a free holiday concert this Sunday, December 22 at 2:00 at the Wesley United Methodist Church, 2206 Fourth Street, in Charleston, Illinois.

The program will include multiple polyphonic settings of "Es ist ein ros entsprungen," "Nun komm der heiden Heiland," "In dulci jubilo," and "Vom Himmel hoch," along with Christmas music that was popular in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We also have a bunch of familiar carols and other musical treats.

Our ensemble has grown over the past decades, and, in addition to multiple recorders, capped reeds, double reeds, strings (with multiple strings), and percussion, we are proud to incorporate our four fine singers into our arrangements.

Please join Rosemary Buck, Tony Cox, Peter Hesterman, Charles Hughes, Jeri Matteston-Hughes, Ruth Riegel, and me for a nice afternoon of festive music.

Holiday Strings Concert Tomorrow Night

Any local readers of this blog are welcome to come! We have a 30-member string ensemble that will be playing a wide variety of musical holiday treats (including new arrangements by me that will be performed for the first time tomorrow).

I understand that there will also be food . . .

The Rewind: Ben shows us the WGBH transmitter

The Snow Queen and Other Plans

Like most people who enter graduate school, I had a lot of energy, many resources, and high hopes for success. I decided to write an opera based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen as a thesis project, and I finished the opera, my thesis, and my degree in 2002.

Plans were underway in the university to build a theater as part of a renovation, and the chair of the music department had plans to mount a production of my opera when the renovation was finished--as a way of opening the theater. Thanks to budget impasses in the state, the renovation was delayed. Then the chair of the music department left the university for a position elsewhere. All plans to perform my opera were simply forgotten.

While things were looking positive for a performance, my son Ben and I designed some nifty snow globes to give to people who would have been involved in the production. A box of Snow Queen snow globes is sitting in the garage, and one snow globe is still sitting on my desk. Here's a photo:



And here's a clearer image of the rune that Ben and I designed to go inside:



Fortunately Raoul Ronson of Seesaw Music was interested in publishing the opera. I made friends with Seymour Barab over the piece (we exchanged scores of operas based on the same story to see how the other person handled the malevolence of the Snow Queen's character). My opera won an honor from an organization in Vienna. When Raoul Ronson died, The Snow Queen went to Subito along with the other Seesaw material. But nobody seems to know about it. I think the piece (and the thesis) has some merit.

The entry for The Snow Queen in my thematic catalog blog that has links a couple of recordings of excerpts from the opera.

So, I'm just leaving this post about the opera here for someone to find one of these days. The orchestral score and parts are available for rental from Subito Music. There are piano/vocal scores in a few university libraries. Here's the Subito link to the piano/vocal score.

A small degree of success is no small thing

Many children dream of fame. They want the world to appreciate their talents, and they want to be rewarded for that appreciation.

I was pretty well known in the elite musical circles of Boston when I was a kid, simply because I was the daughter of a prominent Boston musician. That legacy got me into Juilliard, and helped "buffer" my musical life for decades after I graduated. It gave me access to excellent musicians and chances to play with them. It even gave me some international clout since my father was the principal violist of an orchestra that was respected all over the world. My association with Julius Baker, during my days as a flutist, also helped (even though he didn't do anything personally to help me, even while I was studying with him).

A few years after I moved to a small college town in the Midwest, I transformed myself into a string player. I have also come to enjoy living in the rural Midwest, and have found a great deal of happiness here.

My first experience as a violist was in a string quartet with professional players that had decades more experience than I did. I'm pretty sure that they might have played with me partly because of who my father was. I worked VERY hard to give the impression that I could play, but I was huffing, puffing, and guessing every step of the way. I practiced like crazy, and made slow progress. Because I played in this quartet, I played principal viola in an orchestra (along with my quartet colleagues) when I hadn't had enough experience as a section player to tell a good bowing from a bad one. I shudder to think about the poor people in the viola sections I tried to lead. I knew so little about how to be a leader or how to be an orchestral violist. Now I know better, but it has taken me a good twenty-five years to get here.

Now that I have acquired enough technique to play the viola (and the violin) well enough to keep pace with my (now mostly younger) colleagues, and now that most of my younger colleagues have no idea who my once-famous (and now retired) father is, I feel like I have achieved a small degree of success as a string player on my own merits. That small degree of success is a big thing for me. The small degree of success I have achieved as a composer is a big thing for me as well, because I have done it on my own, and on my own terms.

As a child I never dreamed of fame. I dreamed of being taken seriously because of my ideas and accomplishments. Because I don't make a point of "tooting my horn" (aside from keeping this blog) and selling my "wares," (aside from the pieces that I have published that other people sell) I sometimes feel lost in the fame-seeking society that has developed during the half century that separates me from my childhood. But I believe that I have gotten to a point in my musical and my personal life where people do take me and my ideas seriously.

I know how to choose good fingerings and bowings, and I can play in tune. I can also play with the kind of sound, phrasing, and expression I want to play with, which is no small accomplishment. I’m also confident that I can develop my ideas and solve all the difficulties I encounter when I’m writing or arranging a piece of music. And I'm proud of the body of music I have written during the past twenty years.

I just need to keep reminding my self that a small degree of success is, indeed, no small thing.

The Rewind: Ben takes us to the Antiques Roadshow to see the actual Pearl Harbor radio logs

Music Block Activities: Compound Time

To learn more about these DYI blocks you can look here and here.

You can find a simple time activity here.

You can go here for a free PDF of labels to cut out for 200 1/2" blocks.

Music Block Activities: Simple Time

I have a pair of very young students (age three and five) who need an activity to do with their father while the other sibling is having her lesson. This is a simple-time group of activities that I am excited to start using with my students. You can find a compound time (6/8, 9/8, 12/8) set of activities here.

If you like this idea, please feel free to use this or adapt it for your students' needs.


[click for a larger and more detailed view.]

You can learn more about these DYI blocks here, and here.

You can go here for a free PDF of labels to cut out for 200 1/2" blocks.

Monstrous Regiment of Women

I came across an excellent blog while looking for information about the composer Maddalena Laura Sirmen, who was a student of Giuseppe Tartini. Sharon L. Jansen, the keeper of the blog, sent me back to the IMSLP to find a letter from Tartini to Sirmen, where he implores her to practice playing open strings for an hour every day. In the letter he also clarifies the terms "half shift" and "full shift," and "double shift," that I recall W.A. Mozart writing about in a letter. I have always wondered exactly what those terms meant. Now I know. And so will you.

The half shift is a shift from first position to second position.
The full shift if a shift from first position to third position.
The double shift is a shift from first position to fifth position.

Tartini refers to fourth position in this letter, but he doesn't discuss shifting to it. It is just something you pass through on the way to fifth position.

I have put a link to the Monstrous Regiment of Women in the sidebar, for your reference and mine.

And the mystery composer is (naturally) Anton Titz!

This shouldn't surprise my friends. But the quality of the music might. It impressed Gluck, Prince Lobkowitz and Catherine the Great (Anton Titz's employer in Russia). And now, thanks to the power of the musical internets (and thanks to the IMSLP), his music can be enjoyed and played anywhere, and by anyone.

This edition is available on this page of the IMSLP. I also put a computer-generated recording of the whole thing there. I left off the second repeat of the Allegro agitato because I don't think that section needs to be repeated in this particular piece.



There are two more Violin Sonatas, so keep an eye on this space!

And, while you are waiting, you can read some posts I have written about Anton Titz through this link.

While we are waiting for approval from the IMSLP, here's an audio link to the first movement and part of the second movement that I generated from my Finale file.

Mystery Composer, Mystery Piece

I found the only printed edition of this piece in the IMSLP. That edition has a separate part for the violin and a separate part for the keyboard, but no score. I am in the process of engraving it in Finale because I think it should be part of the repertoire, and in order for that to happen there needs to be a score.

Very few people have heard this piece (there have only been a handful of downloads of the IMSLP file), and only a relative handful of people have heard of this composer.

I'm curious to see what you, the faithful (or casual) reader of this blog, think. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Here's an audio link to the first movement and part of the second movement that I generated from a Finale file.

I will tell you the name of this composer in a few days, after I have finished the engraving.

The Rewind: Ben, Robert MacNeil, and Jim Lehrer tell us a little about vegetarians and Thanksgiving

The Rewind: Ben tells us about the first television production of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Being Seen, Being Heard

Our two-month-old granddaughter is an expert at seeing and being seen. Even at two weeks, when I first met her, she would look deep into my eyes. I could see her, and she could see me. Our two-year-old granddaughter has become an expert at all kinds of other things, but she still has the ability to look deeply into a person's eyes, and to know that she is being seen.

Some of us are not as adept at looking into someone's eyes with the intention of seeing his or her essence. Some of us had the ability in early childhood, but lost it, and some of us who never quite felt "seen" enough in childhood find it difficult to understand the connection between seeing and being seen. For some of us, it becomes a life-long goal to learn to see and learn to be seen. It takes work, but it can be done, though the paths to take are sometimes hard to find.

When we look at a photograph or an image on the television, we are not being seen by that image. When we scroll through images on line we see, but we are not seen. There a lot of people who spend a lot of time "lurking" in the online world who to want to "see" without being seen.

It is unusually easy these days to navigate through life without having much physical interaction. A person can get a college education (and even a K-12 eduction) without much in the way of interaction, and there are ample opportunities to do professional work via computer, thus avoiding seeing and being seen by our co-workers.

We often listen to music under a cloak of invisibility. As lovely as many recordings are, the relationship that any recording has to a person listening to it is one sided. The recording cannot respond to you. You can listen deeply, and pay attention to scads of details. Each listening experience can become more intense for you as you get closer to understanding the way the music is constructed. You can react personally to the particular way the people playing connect to one another, but your presence as a listener will never change the recording.

If you go to a concert and are seen by the people performing, even if it is just as part of a mass audience, the energy and the way you listen can have an effect on the performance. If you are sitting in the front row sleeping, the people playing will notice and react accordingly. So will the members of the audience. Your physical presence at a concert can never really be anonymous, even if you don't know anyone and nobody knows you.

If people are listening attentively, the performing musicians feel it. And there is a sense of communication among members of an audience that you NEVER get when people are sitting in their individual houses or cars listening to a recording.

One of the reasons I love working with children is that we can interact on a deep level: I can see them, and I know that they can see me. If I am working with a child in a lesson and her mind wanders, I can draw her back to the work at hand if I simply listen to her and watch her. Then she can listen to me and watch me. My students LOVE it when they catch me in a mistake: particularly a wrong note or a wrong bowing. I love it when my students see me and hear me. I always present myself as I am, and because of that I expect them to present themselves to me as they are.

When I listen to my students and I ask them to listen to themselves, I believe that they eventually begin to hear themselves. I believe that once they hear themselves they can accept the feelings that come out in their music making. And once they are able to hear themselves, they have a little more of an idea of who they are, at least as musicians.

Every person has stuff to express, and having the means to do it is like an emotional super power.

Because of the illusory and remote nature of internet-dominated interactions, it is easy to feel invisible. And if we aren't constantly raising our "digital voices," whatever we had to say yesterday or last week or last year is no longer interesting to people we are forced to refer to as "followers" or "friends." We are not heard. When we do not engage in those digital platforms, the people we called "friends" no longer "see" us. Unless we really see them in daily off-line life, they are invisible to us, and we are invisible to them.

Yet we all have the same burning need to be seen and heard. Some of us have, for whatever reason (lack of attention when we were children, perhaps) a greater need to keep the flow of energy going in order to communicate what we feel and experience.

Maybe that's why I need musical interaction, and maybe that's why I need it to happen in real time, and in real space. I believe playing music with people (and for people) helps fulfill the need to see and be seen, and the need to hear and be heard. And for those of us who may feel socially awkward (and who doesn't feel that way some time), the music to be played dilutes the awkwardness. In many cases I find that the music obliterates it.

I keep this blog because it helps me to remember that I am a valid human being with things to say. And it's the same with the music I write. I feel that the true value of music exists in the currency of self expression and interaction.

I think that the best gift I can give is to write music and make arrangements that people can use to communicate with one another. And the greatest gift I can receive is to see and hear people enjoying themselves and expressing themselves through my work (the next best gift is being told about it). It's nice to remember that prose, poetry, art, and music can continue to do what it does, even when the people who first "brought it to life" are no longer around.

This piece, that I wrote around 20 years ago, is a musical response to a memorial reading (included without attribution, and most certainly written by someone who is no longer alive) from the New Union Prayer Book:

In light we see; in light we are seen. The flames dance and our lives are full. But as night follows day, the candle of our life burns down and gutters. There is an end to the flames. We see no more and are no more seen. Yet we do not despair, for we are more than a memory slowly fading into the darkness. With our lives we give life. Something of us can never die: we move in the eternal cycle of darkness and death, of light and life.