Romanza Andaluza played by Augustin Hadelich and Augustin Hadelich

Thank you, Augustin for brightening up my day!

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today

From our local paper:

Masks and Small Accomplishments

No matter how jolly the fabric (thank you Jean Petree), or how sturdy the design, these (now washed and hanging to dry) masks that I made give me little in the way of pleasure. Making them was challenging, and I do enjoy a challenge. I used two layers of cotton lawn and two layers of cotton T-shirt material, and made a pocket where we can insert further filters (I hear that vacuum cleaner filters work well). We will certainly use these to go to the grocery store next week, and they are sturdy enough to last during many other (well-spread-out) visits.

Small accomplishments yesterday:

After an on-line lesson with a student with a G-peg stuck on F sharp that wouldn't budge, his mother came for a "drive by" tuning. She handed the case to me through the passenger side of her van. I muscled the peg and tuned the instrument. Then I handed the case back, and she cleaned off the case and the pegs. I washed my hands.

Mission accomplished. Now my student has a chance for a better week of practice.

I finished helping a friend with some preparatory notes for an edition he is working on.

Michael and I finished watching yet another Netflix documentary. This one was "Wild Wild Country," and we both recommend it highly. Watching documentaries about insanity from the past can temporarily take our minds off the insanity of the present.

April Fool from Four Spring Dances for Two Violins

In celebration of the day . . . [the music is from 2011, but the video is new]

Schöner Bogen, Lieber Augustin!

Viola Quote of the Day (from Monkey Business)

Groucho : Ah, 'tis midsummer madness, the music is in my temples, the hot blood of youth! Come, Kapellmeister, let the violas throb. My regiment leaves at dawn!

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 Finale for String Sextet

[click for a larger view]

A friend in Italy who lost his father to the Coronavirus asked me to arrange the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6, his father's favorite piece, for string sextet.

Working on it has been quite an emotional experience for me, and I hope that having this arrangement helps my friend and his mother in their grief. Not being able to grieve in conventional ways is one of the many tragic consequences of this pandemic. This movement of this particular piece sings of the essence of what we are all living through now. Remember that Tchaikovsky wrote this symphony during the cholera pandemic (1881-1896), and he didn't live to hear the premiere.

You can find the score and parts on this page of the IMSLP, and you can also find it here.

If you would like to listen to a computer-generated midi (it is rudimentary, and some of the tempo changes didn't make it through) you can listen here.

Does anyone reading this have skills to put together a video of six people playing this from their different places in isolation?

Augustin Hadelich, Augustin Hadelich, and Sergei Rachmaninoff

Berl Senofsky told me the story of the time, as a boy, he was having a lesson in New York with Ivan Galamian on the Rachmaninoff Vocalise, and it happened that Rachmaninoff was in the building. Rachmaninoff knocked on the door and asked if he could play it with Berl. Rachmaninoff wanted to play it over and over again, and he told Berl and Galamian that it was his favorite piece.

This absolutely amazing reading reminds me of what it might have been like to have been in that room with Rachmaninoff at that time. Thank you Augustin for letting us into your room, at this time.

Ode to Joy in this time of social distancing

You can find more music played by members of the Colorado Symphony in isolation on their YouTube channel.

Family Twitter Fame

The other day I saw a post on Twitter by a person who was trying to help her child with some Kindergarten schoolwork. Since school is closed now because of the virus, parents are trying to keep their kids up to speed at home. Kindergarten work should be child's play, right?

Not true at all.

I was curious about what the worksheet was trying to teach, so I sent the tweet to our daughter, who is a Kindergarten teacher. She figured it out instantly. She didn't have to think about it twice. Her Twitter account is private, so her response couldn't be read by the person posing the problem. A few hours (and a few dozen confused answers) later, I thought it might be a good idea to share Rachel's answer, which I quoted from her private tweet.

During the next day or two we watched the response get dozens, and then hundreds of "likes", and then the number of "likes" reached 1,600!

[I refuse to use that "v" word to describe what was happening.]

And now the whole discussion has made it to a post on Distractify. "Twitter user Elaine" is me.

Beethoven Berg Quartet Project

Of all the things I miss by not being able to interact with people outside of my household during this time of social distancing (or perhaps it is better to call it "physical distancing"), there is nothing I miss more than playing chamber music with people. My March and April schedules were so full of chamber music and orchestral music that I wondered how I could possibly make it through without getting some kind of physical injury.

So here we are.

Practicing solo Bach is fine. Learning new music and playing etudes is fine, but playing by myself isn't stimulating and life affirming for me the way playing chamber music is.

In February Michael decided to listen to the Guarneri Quartet recording of the Beethoven Quartets he bought many years ago. I enjoyed listening to some of the quartets with him, and I enjoyed talking with him about the quartets that he listened to by himself. The Beethoven Quartets are old and true friends.

So, in anticipation of a time when it will be possible to play chamber music again, I decided to learn the first violin parts of all the Beethoven Quartets. I have studied and played the viola parts (though that was many years ago), but I have never thought of trying my hand(s) at the violin parts. Yesterday I looked at Opus 18, No. 1, today I looked at Opus 18, No. 2.

Then I got out my portable CD player, plugged in some headphones, and played the first violin part along with the Alban Berg Quartet. Aside from glossing over the difficult fast passages in the Scherzos of both quartets (which will require a lot of dedicated practice with the metronome), I found playing along with the recording to be a rewarding experience.

I have listened to many Beethoven Quartet cycles, and I find the Alban Berg Quartet's interpretations to be in exact accord with the way I would want to play them.

I think that this is an appropriate way to celebrate the Beethoven Year, and it gives a little bit more structure to my musical day.

Beans

This post has nothing to do with music (unless you think of that old saw that refers to beans as the musical fruit). Don't tell me that it didn't just cross your mind before reading between the parentheses in that first sentence.

Anyway, this is a bit of practical advice appropriate for times like these when it is wise to keep dried beans around. Dried beans keep for years, and they take up less than half the space of canned beans. I think that they taste better because I can control the amount and kind of salt that I use to bring out their flavor.

That's our current stash above. I was shocked to see that we no longer have lentils! (I wrote them on the list for the shopping trip we are planning to take next week.)

I used to be deeply puzzled by the amount of time it took for beans to cook. Cookbooks would say to soak beans overnight and boil them for an hour, but I had to boil them for three hours. I tried using unsalted water, and I tried salting the water. Salting the water would help, but the beans would still come out tough, even after three hours.

I learned that our water is hard (i.e. it tastes good and has a high mineral content), so one fine day a few years ago I tried putting a little bit of baking soda (just a pinch) in the water to balance out the Ph before cooking beans, and VOILA! The beans cooked perfectly!

I hope that this solves your difficulties cooking beans if you have hard water!

Difficult Times

I have spent the last week being productive: practicing, writing music, and trying, within the confines of my home, punctuated by walks in the neighborhood, always keeping distance from any other souls (aside from Michael, my walking companion), to keep things as normal as possible. I have had some success teaching my students via FaceTime, and I'm hoping that they can use the time they have away from school and schedules to practice. They may even make progress, since practicing is the way to do it.

I started one of my violin students on a Kreisler piece, and decided last night that it might be a good idea to use this time to finally learn all the Kreisler pieces I have always wanted to master. Since I didn't go through a traditional path of violin study, a pandemic crisis is as good a time as any to fill in the gaps in my repertoire.

I had high hopes for today, and even made a list of things to do, like cleaning the house. I don't think that's going to happen today. And I think that my practicing is mostly going to be medicinal, to try to maintain sanity and provide temporary respite from fear.

I started the week thinking I might be making lemonade, and am ending the week finding solace in the fact that we are pretty well stocked-up on alcohol (which we will drink sparingly but regularly).

Saprophyte String Quartet Project

I have always been interested in fungi (who isn't?), and thinking about honoring fungi in musical ways (as I have mentioned in previous posts) has been overwhelming because of the variety to consider! Who could choose even a few favorites? I finally decided to write a set of pieces for string quartet in honor of the whole realm of fungi.

In this time of staying inside I might try my hand at making a YouTube video with photographs of some of these amazing organisms to go along with the music, but for now I have put score, parts, and an audio file on this page of my Thematic Catalog, which links to a dropbox folder and an entry in the IMSLP.

Those in the string quartet "know" will understand immediately the source of this particular "decomposition." I am, of course, not the first to have used it for "nourishment."

You can listen here.

Texas Women's University Virtual Orchestra 2020 Plays Florence Price

Sam Flippin, the orchestra director at Texas Women's University, is inviting string players from everywhere and anywhere to join in a virtual orchestra project. He has chosen my transcription of Florence Price’s "Adoration" as his first piece.

If you would like to participate, please go to this website. On this page Sam has parts marked with bowings, and a video of him conducting.

I'm very excited to hear how this all comes together!