Impressions: settings of poetry by Alice Ruth Moore (also known as Alice Dunbar-Nelson)

You can find the music here (transposed higher here) and on this page of the IMSLP. You can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Alice Ruth Moore (1875-1935), the daughter of a once-enslaved mother, was born in New Orleans. She graduated from Straight University, and worked in New Orleans as an elementary school teacher. During the 1920s and 1930s Moore, who then went by the name Alice Dunbar-Nelson, was an activist for African American rights and women’s rights, appearing often as a speaker, and writing essays, reviews, and articles in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals.

The cover art is by my mother, June Fine. I think that my mother would have liked the 20-year-old Moore's poetry (and her other writing) very much. The mood of the poetry, and consequently the music, is rather somber, but we are living in somber times.

Physical distancing, social solidarity

My friend Charles Delman writes:

The phrase ``social distancing'' may have given some the false impression that the purpose is individual protection. We should instead say ``physical distancing, social solidarity.'' The purpose of masks and physical distancing is to protect others, as well as oneself, and reduce the spread of the virus in the community as much as possible.

Social solidarity also requires the elimination of the racial and class inequities that underlie our obscenely unequal society, inequities that are enforced by our repressive policing system. Instead of allowing the repression of a large segment of our population with violence, let us instead build a society in which everyone is provided a good life, with access to good nutrition, good housing, good education, good health care, a healthy environment, and the other fundamentals of a fulfilling life, as a matter of right, rather than as commodities to be bought and sold.

Welcome to the Future

Yesterday I participate in a Zoom discussion that was hosted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra concerning the state of racial imbalance in many of the major American musical institutions (performing and educational). I was extremely impressed with the young people (meaning people who are still students) who spoke, and am eager to aquaint myself with the work of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, which, I believe, is a window to the music of the future.

Schoenberg believed, for a period of time, that the future of music would lie in atonality. He was partially right, because the music of his future (the one that happened after he died--on the date that he predicted he would die) does involve atonality and does involve serialism. The people who wrote for television in the 1970s incorporated serialism and atonality into their scores. Most people watching shows like Bonanza probably didn't even realize that dramatic tension on the screen was often underscored with atonality. And don't forget about Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant score for Planet of the Apes.

Schoenbergian twelve-tone music, and music that followed the atonal course scared concert-goers away from concerts that included "twentieth-century music." Atonality was big when I was young. I actually take nostalgic comfort in hearing the atonality that underscored my teenage years and young adulthood, but I have learned that as human beings we all have emotional ties to the music we heard during those years.

When I was young there were records, cassettes, the radio, concerts, school ensembles, and extra-curricular ensembles. The music we read from was limited to music that was published. I had the opportunity at Tanglewood to hear "in-manuscript" pieces being performed, and also had the opportunity to attend and participate in composers' forums at Juilliard.

With very few exceptions, the music I heard and played during my youth was written by men of European descent. I had no idea that the pop music that I heard on the radio and in public places was performed or written by people who were not of European descent. Nobody told me. And I thought that jazz was a music that only Black people played well. White people who played jazz were, in my limited and immature mind, limited.

There were female singers (obviously), and female song writers who sang their own songs, but as a young person I never thought that there were female composers who wrote anything except pop music. I heard about Lili Boulanger and Nadia Boulanger when I was a teenager hanging out with composers at Tanglewood, and people talked about Clara Schumann (but nobody played her music) and Amy Beach (made fun of in my household), but I thought that they were exceptions to the rule that only men wrote music. There were no female composers at Juilliard. Victoria Bond was a conducting student there. I had no idea she was a composer. Elizabeth Brown was one of my fellow flute students. I had no idea she was a composer.

And there were very few people of color who were students, and none who were teachers. None.

The future at that point looked to me like the past, except with difficult (to play and hear) twentieth-century music added to the mix, and occasionally celebrated.

My life changed through working at a radio station, reading, listening, and learning new music. I was fortunate. I had a record library at the radio station, and I had a university library (with a card catalog) across the campus, and an interlibrary loan system.

People coming of musical age now can curate their own "comfort music" through YouTube. If they are smart, they will use this amazing resource to develop their own opinions and ideas of what is "good" and what is not. They don't have to rely on "gatekeepers" or even algorithms. Wikipedia is, I have found, a better music encyclopedia than Grove.

And through this Covid-19 isolation young people who have a taste for music (and a good internet connection) can hear performances of new music remotely. And they will see and hear that people writing and playing "classical music" really well are people of all genders, of all races, and of all nationalities.

There are some serious points of growth that have been brought on by the Covid-19 isolation:

We are learning that there are excellent musicians everywhere. Great playing is not something that you only find in big cities. You find it everywhere.

And there are a lot of people using this time of isolation to practice.

Musicians are innovative: in the first weeks of the isolation musicians with smartphones and computers figured out how to record themselves and assemble plausible performances of short pieces with other musicians isolated in different places. I have heard some of the most moving performances put together in this way.

A lot of people use a free Acapella smartphone app that publishes directly to Facebook and Instagram. Selections are limited to three or four minutes, so shorter "classical" musical selections are being recorded and performed in this way a lot. Musicians who would not normally try their hand at arranging are making excellent arrangements. And we all know that making arrangements is a gateway drug to composition.

Some musicians are finding that they enjoy the technical process of weaving together remote voices. Some are "producing" excellent videos. These are skills of the future, because I believe that this way of music making will retain a place in the post-Covid-19 musical future.

I don't think that musicians will be abandoning the friendships they have made through these videos.

Musicians have time and space to think about what their organizations will look like once we are able to play together in real spaces, with in-person audiences. I imagine that the future of those organizations will need to be far more inclusive concerning race and gender because that is where (eventually) the greater cultures of the world are headed. And there will be more and more ensembles like Kaleidoscipe run (I hope) by people like the students I met on this forum. There is no "going back" to the way things were. And I think that is a good thing.

Robert Nathaniel Dett's "Night" arranged for euphonium and tuba ensemble

This video tribute is set to an awesome (in the true sense of the word) eight-voice arrangement of "Night" from Robert Nathaniel Dett's 1913 solo piano suite "In the Bottoms." The arrangement was made by Jasmine Pigott. She is joined (from varios remote locations) by Jermaine Fryer, Benjamin Horne, David Lamotey, Remus Webb, Jason Tanksley, Noah McDonald, Errol Rhoden, and Andre Thacker as the appropriately-named "COVID 19 Black All-Star Tuba-Euphonium Ensemble."

Instutute for Composer Diversity Spotlight on Black Composers

The Institute for Composer Diversity, a newly-created (in-process) interactive database of composers who are generally underrepresented in the field of classical music, is featuring Black composers this month. They started with composers of music for brass, particuarly for Euphonium and Tuba.

You can have a look here.

Lisa Hirsch Speaks the Truth

Thank you, Lisa.

Read her post calling out the American League of Orchestras. Then read her two posts about solidarity here and here.

And then you can spend the next several weeks thinking about how the field of what we call "classical music" can move into a better 21st century, along with the rest of the world.

What's an analogy?

Yesterday afternoon I was trying to get my (hard-working but a bit overwhelmed) nine-year-old student to pay attention to the tasks at hand in the measure he was playing. I thought immediately of sitting at a railroad crossing watching the train cars go slowly by, and it crossed my mind that once a train car has moved past my field of vision I don't think about it anymore.

Me: Have you ever been sitting in a car stopped at a railroad crossing, watching train cars go by?

Student: I don't think so.

Me: I guess I'll have to think of another analogy.

Student: What's an analogy?

Vernā Myers on how to overcome our biases

These eighteen minutes of compassionate wisdom really helped me today.

Miniature Studies for Violin Solo 6 through 11

The rest of the set!



VI. What the Hex?
VII. Seas, Days, Hills, and Rainbows
VIII. Arachnida
IX. Pluto
X. Das Hexen - Einmal- Eins!
XI. Group Eleven

Music by Elaine Fine
Performed by Linnaea Brophy
5/29/2020

You can find a link to the music here.

Ella's Song

Listening to this helps, somehow. Just a little bit.

The sound that says love, a ramble

After my parents discarded the Zenith 87232 "Bakelite" tube radio that we kept in the kitchen, I brought it into my room. On Sunday nights I would listen to a program that played soundtracks from shows, and I would record them on cassette and play them over and over. One of my favorite shows was Applause.

What is it that we're living for?
Applause applause!
Nothing I know
brings on the glow
like sweet applause.

You're thinking you’re through
and nobody cares
then suddenly you
hear it
starting.

And somehow you're in charge again
and life's a ball
trumpets all sing,
life seems to swing
And you're the king of it all, 'cause

You've had a taste of
the sound that says love:
Applause, applause, applause!

[I eventually had to throw the radio away after one of tubes gave out and I could not find a replacement. But life goes on, I guess.]

Anyway, I loved the song because of the tune, the harmony, the way the words rhymed and the way it felt to sing them, the dynamic contrasts, the contrasts in texture, and the rhythm. But I could not make sense of the idea of applause as being the sound of love. The music itself was the sound of love to me. The applause was the noise that followed.

But I suppose there are people who really do "get" something from being applauded. Don't get me wrong, I like to applaud when I am part of an audience. It is a great physical release after experiencing the intense kind of emotional connections that music makes possible. It is a great way to "connect" with a group of people who just shared an emotional experience.

But it isn't the sound that says love to me.

Now, during the era of Covid-19 isolation, where the closest thing to experiencing the illusion of applause is to make a livestream from the place you are living, and getting "likes" and "loves" in emoji form stream upward because people in faraway places press buttons on their phones, tablets, or computers.

If I were to make a livestream, would I be looking at the emojis and feel love coming from them rather than concentrating on the music? Would it be more meaningful to me than applause? Would it be less meaningful than applause?

When I think of my childhood, my best memories are the sounds of love coming from the basement. My father practicing was the sound of love. The sound of loving sound. And I identified it as love. That sound of love was what motivated me to practice, and being able to experience the sound of love with other people was, for me, the sharing of love. Teaching for me has always been the act of trying to ignite that love of music in other people. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

I have had students of all stripes over the years. Many of them play because of the attention it necessitates from their parents. Many parents who love music want their children to play because they never had the chance. For some of those children the act of music is part of their loving relationship with their parents: they know that when they give love through music it is accepted as a gift of love.

For some children the process of playing music has everything to do with pleasing me (their teacher). For some of those children I am just another teacher: a person to who will be discarded from memory when the student moves to another grade, and for some I am gifted with the art of showing them how to express themselves.

My best musical experiences with students happen when they reveal something beautiful about themselves through music: when they fall in love with music itself, and when they physically understand that they are in charge of making the journey from point A to point B, and can draw on their creativity to figure out exactly how they want to go.

I listened to a lot of concerts as a teenager, and I listened a lot to people playing in a variety of non-concert situations. And like most teenagers I thought I knew a lot about the world. One accurate observation I made as a teenager proves that I did have a bit of wisdom: I knew that there was a difference between those who "played at" and those who "played to."

I deemed "playing at" bad and "playing to" good. I was a teenager, and did not have the experience to understand the complexities of life or of music. I tried to figure out rhythmic ways of not sounding like I was "playing at," and found ways of intellectually manipulating phrases so that they gave the illusion of bringing someone into my musical train of thought rather than bashing them over the head with it.

Now, after a few decades of experience, I see the whole thing differently.

I know a person who loves music deeply can play with very little feeling about who is in the room, or who is listening. That person can put up an imaginary bubble, and live within that world while the music is happening. S/he can be totally engaged, and the music can be wonderful. The act of playing can be a dialogue with timbre, the length and contour of phrases, linear harmony, vertical harmony, harmonic rhythm, and the composer, withought regard for whether s/he is alive or dead.

A person "playing to" can be playing in order to seek approval, or in order to receive feelings of love in exchange for lovely phrases of music. Or a person "playing to" can be eagerly trying to engage the listener in what s/he loves about a piece of music.

Perhaps the synthesis of the better parts of "playing to" and "playing at" is way of thinking about playing “for” whoever is listening. And that is how I choose to live my more mature musical life.

The ways of life we, as human beings, have experienced over the course of recorded human history is now taking turns through blind alleys that lead to an "elsewhere" we do not have the capacity to understand. It makes me wonder about the changes happening in the collective musical "organism" (and I like to believe that there is one that unites you and me through music) during this period of isolation and into the future.

Augustin Hadelich plays Praeludium and Allegro!

I hope that this gives you as much absolute musical pleasure as it gives me.

Goods and Services

"Why have you come to Berlin?"

"Formerly a woman gave herself and was valued as a gift. Now we are paid, and the day comes when we are thrown aside, like all goods that are bought and made use of. It's cheaper to pay cash, thinks the man."

"Formerly a gift and a commodity were two quite different things. Now a gift is merely a commodity that can be bought for nothing. Its cheapness makes the purchaser suspicious. It must be a bad bargain, he thinks. And generally he is right. For later the woman presents him with the bill. Suddenly he is called on to refund the moral price of the gift. In moral currency. As a pension for life.

From Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist.

Rachel Young and Jessica Smithhorn a movement of my Duo for Oboe and Bassoon

What a treat it was to find this today!

Learning how a great musician thinks

This video of Augustin Hadelich commenting on his performance (as a 13-year-old) of the Sibelius Concerto is fascinating. This, my friends, is an fantastic example of how a great musician thinks.