Music is a mystery for people who play it, write it, listen to it, and write about it. The only thing I can really do when I try to say something about music is assume.
I feel so sad that we are not playing this concert tonight. I'm very proud of the poster I made for it, so I'm sharing it here.
We have spent the past several months rehearsing carefully, and we were excited about celebrating St. Patrick's Day with music. There are recordings of these pieces that can be found on YouTube or in the IMSLP (for members). I'm sharing the program here so, if you want to, you can add music from the program to your private celebrations of things Irish at home.
Not everything is purely Irish, of course. McEwen was a Scottsman, and Bantock, though he used an Irish song and an Irish jig as the material for the last movement of his viola sonata, was English. But Stanford was Irish, and so was Field.
We will play the program at some time in the future. Hopefully we won't have to wait a year to do it.
I vividly remember the first few minutes after giving birth to our daughter. I felt a momentary sense sisterhood with all mothers, everywhere, and through all time. Even across species.
Other times when I have felt profound connections to people I did not know have been observing natural wonders, like a sudden rainstorm in a city, or a rainbow, or experiencing music together as part of an audience.
But for the next few weeks I intend to savor my connection with other musicians, urban and rural, accomplished and aspiring, famous and not known at all, as part of a giant chorus of solo Bach, played on all instruments, in every country, and at all times of day and night.
Last Saturday my friend Ken Greider died of brain cancer, and yesterday I played this arrangement of Amazing Grace at his memorial service. Ken, the grandfather of one of my students, went above and beyond all conventional measures to support his second grade granddaughter's violin habit. He listened to her practice, gave her excellent instruments, gifted her with nifty violin accessories, and took her to concerts. He built her a music stand, and then, one day, he built one for me.
It's the music stand I use every day to practice. I just now took all the music off so that I could take these pictures and share them here:
Yesterday afternoon there weren't any reports of Coronavirus in our part of the state, so I felt fine about playing for the memorial service. I still did my best to keep physical distance from people, which is very difficult in a memorial service. I played a couple of pieces with my student that I arranged for violin and viola, and I played this arrangement of Amazing Grace that I made for the occasion (and am sharing here for other people to play).
In the evening, shortly after the memorial service, Michael and I played for Shabbat services, and I said Kaddish for Ken. It was a very lovely community/musical experience.
This morning we learned that someone had tested positive with Coronavirus in the local hospital last night.
The schools and universities in Illinois are closed now, all my orchestras have prematurely ended their seasons, and the St. Patrick's Day concert I was planning to play with John David is cancelled. Rehearsals for all my ensembles will have to wait for a time when we know we are all safe from the virus. Thank goodness I can give my students their lessons using FaceTime. I am hoping that they will use their time off from school to do some good practicing.
Even though there isn't a concert to play on Tuesday, I still have scales, etudes, and music to practice. And I know that there will be a time in the future when life, musical and otherwise, will return to normal. In the meantime there are books to read, movies to watch, blog posts to write, and I have a new piece in the works (and time to work on it). I also have excellent company here at home.
I found a small bottle with a screw cap in my medicine cabinet to fill with hand sanitizer, and used "stand hand" labels to cover the bottle's old label. I then protected the whole thing with clear packing tape.
In the first semester of my second year at Juilliard I took a class with David Diamond that was devoted to studying fugues. It was 1977, and I was at the impressionable age of eighteen. David Diamond was sixty-two, and he was considered old-fashioned at the time since his music was diatonic and tonal. I thought he was really interesting, and I used to talk to him (or, rather, listen to what he wanted to say to me), even though my flute teacher thought he was crazy,
He told me about his mother being Emma Goldman's seamstress.
(I had to go to the library and find out who Emma Goldman was)
He must have told me other things, but what sticks out most in my mind (aside from the stories in this blogpost) was his vehement recommendation that I read Cyril Scott's Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages.
The book was in the Juilliard library, and I read it immediately. Part I discusses the problems of musicality, pure music, inspiration, and invention. Part II has discussions about Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin (one chapter called "the Apostle of Refinement," and another called "Chopin, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Emancipation of Women"), Schumann, Wagner, and Strauss.
Then we get to Part III: ESOTERIC CONSIDERATIONS--THE MUSIC OF THE DEVA OR NATURE SPIRIT EVOLUTION. The chapters in this section are about musicians and the higher powers, the occult constitution of man, Franck, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Delius, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin ("a Deva-exponent"), the "hyper-moderns," Moussorgsky and the Sublimation of Ugliness, and popular music.
Part IV is labeled "Historical." Here we get opinions on the music of India, Ancient Egypt, Greeks, Romans, Folksong, Polyphony, the Reformation, and the section culminates with "A cursory View of the Musical Effects in England from the Pre-Elizabethan Days to those of Handel.
Part V: SOME OCCULT PROGNOSTICATIONS has a single chapter that is aptly called "The Music of the Future."
Last night I got to perform David Diamond's Rounds for String Orchestra. The recording below is not of my orchestra, but it is what our performance of this piece aspired to be.
The first time I read through the viola part I noticed that the main subject of the piece (you can hear it seventeen seconds into the above recording) is very similar to the 1926 hit song, "Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise."
A few months ago Michael and I were watching a documentary about Louise Brooks that was on a DVD of one of her movies. It's not this one, but I'm leaving it here anyway (for people reading this who don't know who Louise Brooks is, and for me to watch later).
The documentary we saw had an interview with David Diamond, who knew Louise Brooks well. If I noticed the resemblance between the subject of the Rounds and the melody of "Louise," David Diamond certainly would have noticed (while he was writing the piece). Homage, perhaps?
This morning I went searching around the internets to see if I could find more about David Diamond, and I came across a tribute to him in the MacDowell Colony newsletter, where they have reprinted a story that he told there in 1991. After reading this story I now understand David Diamond's personal fascination with the Cyril Scott book.
Odd musical (or hyper musical) forces might have been in place that fall semester of 1977 that would allow me the honor of being a kind of spokesperson for Diamond in 2020 (both in my musical community and on this blog). Or, then again, I might have been the only person to go to the library and actually read the book he recommended.
Here's David Diamond's story:
[click on the image for a larger view]
Unless you want to wait through 50+ minutes with the people waiting for Elizabeth Warren to come home (I believe they are set up at her home in Cambridge), scroll towards the end. Thank you, Elizabeth Warren. I feel so sad that I won't be able to cast my vote for you in the 2020 election.
And here's the email message that she sent to her supporters today:
Elaine,
I’m going to start with the news. I wanted you to hear it straight from me: today, I’m suspending our campaign for president.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you have poured into this campaign.
I know that when we set out, this was not the news you ever wanted to hear. It is not the news I ever wanted to share. But I refuse to let disappointment blind me — or you — to what we’ve accomplished. We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together — what you have done — has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters — and the changes will have ripples for years to come.
What we have done — and the ideas we have launched into the world, the way we have fought this fight, the relationships we have built — will carry through for the rest of this election, and the one after that, and the one after that.
So think about it:
We have shown that it is possible to build a grassroots movement that is accountable to supporters and activists and not to wealthy donors — and to do it fast enough for a first-time candidate to build a viable campaign. Never again can anyone say that the only way that a newcomer can get a chance to be a plausible candidate is to take money from corporate executives and billionaires. That’s done.
We have shown that it is possible to inspire people with big ideas, possible to call out what’s wrong and to lay out a path to make this country live up to its promise.
We have shown that race and justice — economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, criminal justice — are not an afterthought, but are at the heart of everything that we do.
We have shown that a woman can stand up, hold her ground, and stay true to herself — no matter what.
We have shown that we can build plans in collaboration with the people who are most affected.
This campaign became something special, and it wasn’t because of me. It was because of you. I am so proud of how you fought this fight alongside me: you fought it with empathy and kindness and generosity — and of course, with enormous passion and grit.
Some of you may remember that long before I got into electoral politics, I was asked if I would accept a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was weak and toothless. And I replied that my first choice was a consumer agency that could get real stuff done, and my second choice was no agency and lots of blood and teeth left on the floor. In this campaign, we have been willing to fight, and, when necessary, we left plenty of blood and teeth on the floor. I can think of one billionaire who has been denied the chance to buy this election.
And we did all of this without selling access for money. Together, you and 1,250,000 people gave more than $112 million dollars to support this campaign. And we did it without selling one minute of my time to the highest bidder. People said that would be impossible. But you did that.
Together, we built a grassroots campaign that had some of the most ambitious organizing targets ever — and then we turned around and surpassed them.
Our staff and volunteers on the ground knocked on over 22 million doors across the country. We made 20 million phone calls and sent more than 42 million texts to voters. That’s truly astonishing. It is.
We also advocated for fixing our rigged system in a way that will make it work better for everyone.
A year ago, people weren’t talking about a two-cent wealth tax, Universal Child Care, cancelling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap, breaking up big tech, or expanding Social Security. And now they are. And because we did the work of building broad support for all of those ideas across this country, these changes could actually be implemented by the next president.
A year ago, people weren’t talking about corruption, and they still aren’t talking about it enough — but we’ve moved the needle, and a hunk of our anti-corruption plan is already embedded in a House bill that is ready to go when we get a Democratic Senate.
And we also did it by having fun and by staying true to ourselves. We ran from the heart. We ran on our values. We ran on treating everyone with respect and dignity. But it was so much more. Four-hour selfie lines and pinky promises with little girls. A wedding at one of our town halls. And we were joyful and positive through all of it. We ran a campaign not to put people down, but to lift them up — and I loved pretty much every minute of it.
I may not be in the race for president in 2020, but this fight — our fight — is not over. And our place in this fight has not ended.
Because for every young person who is drowning in student debt, for every family struggling to pay the bills on two incomes, for every mom worried about paying for prescriptions or putting food on the table, this fight goes on.
For every immigrant and African American and Muslim and Jewish person and Latinx and transwoman who sees the rise in attacks on people who look or sound or worship like them, this fight goes on.
For every person alarmed by the speed with which climate change is bearing down upon us, this fight goes on.
And for every American who desperately wants to see our nation healed and some decency and honor restored to our government, this fight goes on.
When I voted on Tuesday at the elementary school down the street, a mom came up to me. She said she has two small children, and they have a nightly ritual. After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep: Mama leans over them and whispers, “Dream big.” And the children together reply, “Fight hard.”
So if you leave with only one thing, it must be this: Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only option ahead of you: nevertheless, you must persist.
You should be so proud of what we’ve done together — what you have done over this past year.
Our work continues, the fight goes on, and big dreams never die.
I appreciate this because I love Robertson Davies's work, and am happy to no longer work as a critic. What Davies says about literary critics applies in the musical sphere as well.
I just learned that the Maine-based violin duo with the fantastic name of "Duo Mycorrhizae" will be playing a piece of mine on a couple of concerts in March and April. I haven't (yet) written any music based on fungi, but I have written a set of violin duets concerning different kinds of trees.
But ideas about the behavior of these nifty life forms are mushrooming in my brain. There is suddenly so much to explore!
Even though it is no longer classified as a fungus (kind of like Pluto not being classified as a planet, I guess), I will have to include a musical portrait of slime mold. I remember when I found some in the yard, and spent a wonderful afternoon at the university library going through the botany books with our (then maybe seven-year-old) son, and being fascinated. It was before the internets . . .
. . . where I'm about to go to learn more about mycorrhizae.
Organizing recordings into a functional library is difficult. I remember noticing that WCRB-FM (outside of Boston) organized their LPs by record label and by the number on the label. That was in the 1970s when there were relatively few record labels around. I maintained a record library when I worked at WEIU-FM, and I had to expand it to include CDs, which required a lot of thought.
Fortunately I was only responsible for organizing the "classical" music. Recordings that were not "classical" fell under genres that were often student-generated. And new "genres" of music were being coined right and left. The "artist" was always singular. Jazz was divided into all sorts of categories, none of which made complete sense to me.
When iTunes came out with its fields to classify music, the organizing system look like something created by former college radio DJs. When I noticed that there wasn't a field for "composer," I smelled trouble.
Dan Meier has a piece on Medium that follows that smell, and leads us into the woes of trying to learn more about "classical" music through the devices that claim to make all things possible.
To aid in the search for music written by women to offer to young (or adult starter) violinists, here's an example of some lovely and expressive music by Ethel Barns. It's part of a collection of eight pieces written to be played in the first position:
You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP. It is the first part of a two-volume set. I'm hoping that someone will add the second volume in the near future.
The pieces in the first volume also work nicely for violists who are comfortable playing in fifth position. I like the fact that the piano parts are "string-teacher" easy.
Barns also wrote difficult violin music that you can find on this page of the IMSLP. I check back from time to time to see the new (old) Barns gems that people have added to her page.
Anybody who participates in musical life knows that young people are the future of music. And it is important for those of us who are of a certain age to share what we have learned. There are, of course, young people who seem not to care what the "boomer" generation has to offer, but there are young people who do care.
During Women's History and Awareness Month this March, when a young person asks either in person or in an online forum about repertoire to learn, I plan to suggest something technique-appropriate written by a women. I might even continue the practice after the month of March.
You can do this too. If you don't have ready answers, you can make a point of educating yourself (there are many resources, particularly online).
If you teach, doing this will certainly make you a better teacher.
There's a nice article in today's New York Times where a teacher and a student who is unable to leave his home in China because he is infected with the Coronavirus have made the best of the situation.
I found the premise of the article interesting, but then I realized that the whole relationship that this student has to his teacher, who lives in America, is conducted by way of Skype, so the only really unusual thing here is that he has nothing to do but practice!
The roads here in rural Illinois were icy yesterday, so I taught my first ever lesson by way of FaceTime last night. I set myself up: I put my iPad on a music stand in exactly the same place where my student would stand, and had another music stand with her music next to me. It surprised me that we could actually work on basic things like fingerings and rhythm, and I found that I could still figure out what was going on in my student's mind to cause some of her difficulties.
(I find it interesting that when playing in an unfamiliar position on the violin or the viola that rhythmic confidence tends to suffer. My solution? Learn to play challenging rhythms in familiar positions so that there is "head space" for counting.)
This student is smart, fairly advanced, and has a great ear for intonation and sound quality. The sound quality that came out of her iPhone and into my iPad was not always beautiful, but I knew that the lack of beauty had to do with the means of transmission and not because of her sound production. If our relationship was entirely electronic, I would really have no way of knowing much about the quality of her sound, unless both of us had professional sound equipment.
Also, there was a time delay that popped in here and there, and the sound would drop out occasionally for a note or two. The relationship of the bow and the fingers to the notes I heard was not exact. Teaching string instruments properly, in my opinion, has everything to do with the exact relationship of bow and the fingers. There would be no way I could work on that aspect of playing with a student via FaceTime. I like to comment when something is being done correctly while a student is playing, and my students are used to this. With the time delay in the computer connection it just isn't possible, and when I said something this student would stop playing.
But nobody got hurt in the ice, and we can both appreciate the fact that next week looks clear, and that we can have our next lesson in real time and space.
Christopher Cerrone put this list on Twitter, and I'm sharing it here with my own selected representative links, in case some of these pieces may be unfamiliar. I chose ad-free YouTube links, so you will be able to understand the relationship of the candidate to the piece immediately. Ultimately, this ends up being a darn good set of contemporary piano pieces!
Bernie Sanders: Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated
Elizabeth Warren: György Ligeti's Etudes
Pete Buttigieg: Nikolai Kapustin's Concert Etudes
Joe Biden: Carl Vine's Piano Sonatas
Amy Klobuchar: Paul Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis
Andrew Yang: Hans Otte's Das Buch der Klänge
Tom Steyer: Ann Southam's Simple Lines of Enquiry
Mike Bloomberg: Kaikosru Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum
Maryanne Williamson: La Monte Young's The Well Tuned Piano
I was explaining to a nine-year-old student why the f-holes are shaped the way they are, and how the vibrating air inside the violin makes the four "tongues" vibrate and helps the sound project.
His response: “Like the four chambers of the heart!”
The Mozart G minor Piano Quartet was on the radio at lunchtime today. Michael recognized the theme immediately from a Haydn "London" Trio that I used to play on the baroque flute some thirty-odd years ago. This seems to be a case of Haydn paying homage to his late friend Mozart.
Here's the last movement of the Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, written in 1785:
Here's the last movement of the Haydn "London" Trio #1 in C major, Hob. IV:1, written in 1794 (it should start at 6:57):
I am active as a composer, a violist, a violinist, a recorder player, and as a teacher. I have been keeping this space in the blogosphere alive with assumptions about music (and assorted other things) since 2005.
