5th Annual International Music by Women Festival

I am proud to be participating in this festival as a composer (with music being performed on two of the concerts), and am so excited to be able to hear performances from the entire festival by way of this YouTube channel.

I hope that after it is possible to have in-person concerts and festivals again that this festival will continue to make their concerts available on YouTube.

A Tunes: Capricious Pieces for Beginner Violinists

[From the back cover]

Incorporating skills taught in many popular violin methods, these tuneful solo pieces offer a fresh alternative for teachers who would like a stimulating supplement to their usual method. These entertaining and whimsical compositions reinforce and develop violin skills through repetition disguised as lyrical musical phrases. They strengthen the left hand, exercise the fourth finger, and use rests in musically compelling ways that keep the student attentive.

They also present mixed meter and double-stops, and offer a practical introduction to musical form and phrase structure. Slurs and dynamics are incorporated immediately, along with right-hand pizzicato on stopped strings and left-hand pizzicato on all open strings. These pieces are written specifically to encourage interpretive creativity, even at the most elementary levels. As twenty-first-century pieces for solo violin, they are meant to be performed as well as studied.

I wrote these pieces to isolate and address specific right-hand and left-hand difficulties that my students have encountered while working through the first three Suzuki books. The progress my students have made while working on these pieces has suprised even me. Up until this point only a few of my friends have enjoyed using them in their teaching, and now that it is being released by Mel Bay "A Tunes" can be used by everyone. The book can be ordered (it's very reasonably priced at $12.99) via the Mel Bay Website.

As a introduction, here's a video of Linnaea Brophy playing "The Big Dipper."

You can find videos of Linnaea playing all twenty pieces on this playlist.

Doktor Faustus! Doktor Faustus!

Anna Maria Olivari's book about musical interpretations of Thomas Mann's novel is now in print and available as a printed book or as an open-source download. You can get it through this link.

She includes a lengthy discussion (with musical examples) of my Four Pieces from Doktor Faustus, which is very exciting for me to read, even in German.

And speaking of German, I was perplexed at first (I never saw such a thing before), and then delighted to meet the Gendersternschen for the first time. Here it is, embedded in a cognate from English, boldly declaring that a group of "specialists" should not be identified as being male because of archaisms that are built into the language.

Scales, Scales, and More Scales

Twenty-four one-page scale studies in all of the major and minor keys, in versions for soprano recorder (c fingerings) and alto recorder (f fingerings). They can also be played on just about any melody instrument.

The titles of these recorder scale pieces relate to the weighing and measuring applications of the word "scale." This set of scale pieces will be available soon on this page of the IMSLP. And in forthcoming news, I am working on two scale books for violin that will be published later in 2021 by Mel Bay. One concentrates on the first position, and the other goes into the higher positions. The titles and characteristics of these violin pieces (more than fifty!) relate to animals with scales: fish, birds, reptiles, and even a handful of mammals.

For the recorder scale pieces and the forthcoming violin scale pieces I followed this basic guideline: everything moves stepwise, with pitches that repeat at the unison and at the octave (the only interval larger than a second is a perfect octave). I allowed myself freedom to float between the natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales. Just for added sport, each piece fits on (or fills) a single page.

UPDATE: Because I can't leave well enough alone, I made versions for bass clef instruments and viola. You can find both on the "transcriptions" tab of the above link.

The Secret Key to Haydn

I got an email message today introducing me to a music school in London called WKMT. In this documentary the school's teachers talk about their teaching methods, their school, and one another. They are devoteed to a method of teaching based on the work of Vincenzo Scaramuzza. This involves joints that are fluent but not loose, and vigorous but not rigid. These ideas seem to be extremely specific to the piano, but I imagine once they rattle around in my head for a while I will manage to make analogies to the bow arm. You can hear a reading of Scaramuzza's general ideas here.

What I find most enticing about this school's website is the fact that they offer a full analysis of the piano sonatas in Haydn's Hoboken XVI by an array of scholars. Understanding is the secret key to playing Haydn well. And the other secret is that there are no secrets.

They also have a blog that is well worth exploring (I'm putting the link in the sidebar too. Look for "WKMT").

Augustin Hadelich talks about Mozart

Mela Tenenbaum

One of the perks of working at a radio station is that you sometimes get a chance to have phone friendships with the people who make the recordings. I had the great good fortune to have many conversations with the great violinist, violist, and viola d'amore player, Mela Tenenbaum.

Mela and I lost touch after I left the radio station, but an inquiry about her on the Facebook viola group sent me on a search to find her whereabouts.

I didn't find out exactly where Mela is now, but I did find something that seems to be a chapter from a forthcoming book, which am I sharing here. After reading this I imagine that you will head to YouTube to hear Mela play. I will make it easy for you. Just go through this link.

Mela Tenenbaum, Virtuoso Musician

I was born in a small town called Chernovtsy.  It belongs to the Ukraine now, but earlier in the century it was part of Romania.  In another time, as Czernowitz, it belonged to Poland and later to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  So it had a very special culture.  Most of the people in this town could speak three languages and were highly educated.  Aside from that, Chernovtsy was one of those Jewish towns that had its own Jewish professor, Jewish shoemaker, Jewish doctor, and even Jewish alcoholic.  So I was raised in this very special environment, where I spent my childhood and part of my adult life.  I studied at a music school in Chernovtsy.  It was a very good school.

All of my former schoolmates now work as professional musicians in different parts of the world – some in Russia, some in Tel Aviv, and some in New York.  The cultural differences between my native town and the rest of the Soviet Union were so immense that when I moved to Kiev, it was no less dramatic than my immigration to America.  For instance, going to a concert was always a big event in Chernovtsy.  People would prepare way in advance, thinking of what they would wear, how they would look.  In Kiev, you could easily attend a concert wearing slippers, or a T-shirt; it was a much more casual event.

It's not easy to explain why I decided to leave Kiev.  We used to say it was because we were Jews.  In truth, it was the Chernobyl disaster that completely turned our lives upside down.  My children became sick after the explosion of the nuclear reactor in 19xx.  I thought we'd lose them.  My eldest son was twenty-seven at the time, my daughter twenty-five, and my youngest son was ten.  After the catastrophe in Chernobyl^*, the general mood in Kiev was one of doom.  People really felt hopeless.  At first we expected measures to be taken to improve our living conditions, such as new apartments or raises in salary.  But nothing happened. The authorities didn't spend a cent on social benefits.  So we lost all hope of better living conditions.  My family lived in a tiny apartment, and I had no room to practice.  I wanted very much to leave, but that wasn't so easy. 

I was a soloist with the Kiev Philharmonic.  I went on wonderful tours and played with the best orchestras in the country.  At a certain point, I made a deal with myself: that I'd never regret anything, even if I happened never again to play the violin.  In the Soviet Union, musicians were always a privileged caste.  The belief was that if you're an engineer, you were trained to become an engineer; but if you're a musician, you were born to be one.

Yet, after Chernobyl, we decided to leave the country.  I left with my husband and children.  Four days before our departure, I gave my last performance with the Kiev Philharmonic.  So I had these fresh memories of the audience’s applause.  They all knew me and loved me.  From the time I was a child, I remember being always surrounded by people, wherever I'd go.  Part of it was language: I knew and loved my language, the Russian language, I could express myself with precision, express the slightest overtone of meaning in this language.  And now I was going to a country whose language I didn't know at all.  I couldn’t ask for a piece of bread in English.  I knew German very well.  I could have gone to Germany, like a lot of our friends from Chernovtsy.  In Germany we would receive passports right away.  They don't call Jewish immigrants “Jews” in Germany, they call them “German citizens who practice Judaism.”  I loathed those words the first time I heard them.  Anyway, I couldn't seriously think of going to Germany.

We took a train from Kiev to Vienna.  It was a peculiar experience.  Imagine it: you throw your luggage, your suitcases, through the window into the train, and next to you in the compartment is a family of ten people, only three of whom are men.  Two women are pregnant, and one of the men, the youngest, drinks nonstop.  The oldest tries to carry the suitcases, but he's ninety-two years old so everybody shouts at him to leave the suitcases alone.  But there is nobody else to carry those suitcases because the third man has no legs.  So, all this: tossing the suitcases, children who are always ill on the road, overcrowded trains, kids looking for someone whose last name they don't know.  When we finally arrived in Vienna, we stood in this long line on the platform with the other immigrants, absolutely faceless, because what matters to a Soviet person is his passport, not himself.  So, we were waiting on this platform, with my son lying ill on the trunks, and suddenly we saw a crowd coming out from the nearby opera house.  The show had just ended.  We saw all these dressed-up people, talking, and not laughing – Austrians don't laugh, they cackle, they roar.  And I began to cry: it was actually the first time that I cried in my adult life.  I had this piercing feeling that I'd never again play the violin, never again be on stage.  But I knew I had made my choice. 

We went to Italy.  It happened that we spent five-and-a-half months in Italy.  We had wanted to go to New York, but New York was overcrowded with immigrants at the time, so we had to wait in Italy.  We spoke Italian relatively well. We lived in a house in the mountains, near Florence, with nine other immigrant families.  There were all kinds of people: a shoemaker, musicians, engineers.  There is one observation I made about Russian emigrants.  When they had to write their résumés, describing the positions they held back in Russia, somehow they all turned into  “supervisors.”  If someone was a shoemaker, he was a “supervisor-shoemaker.”  If he was a doctor, he was a supervisor-doctor.  I remember my first English teacher in America once asking her students, “Why have things turned out so badly in Russia?'”  And I replied, using whatever bad English I had at the time: “Because all the supervisors have left.”

Our Italian friends tried to talk us into staying in Italy.  One of them owned a photo shop. He often visited us and heard me play.  There was a man who belonged to Italian high society.  The man owned an enormous estate, as well as coffee plantations in Brazil. He had graduated from the conservatory in Rome and considered himself an artist.  He was a painter and a hunter.  Anyway, he invited us to his home for dinner one evening.  I'll never forget his mansion – all that land, a huge lake with white swans.  He greeted us wearing tall leather boots and a hunter's hat with a feather – an artistic look.  Two tables were set up: one was for his wife, the woman who had introduced us, some other couple, and my husband; the second table was for himself and me.  There were two servants to take care of us.  The women were all wrapped in white sheets, like tunics.  After dinner, he took a brush and began to paint these sheets, their dresses.  I felt as if I were in a Fellini movie, only this was much more ridiculous.  After he finished painting the dresses, he told me, “Well, now, we can play some music.”  He sat at the piano.  I took my violin.  I thought I'd choke with laughter, but I had to accompany him.  The women in painted dresses were sitting at his feet.

Eventually, we arrived in New York and settled in Brooklyn.  We had friends living in Brooklyn, and they found us an apartment.  Compared to our tiny apartment in Kiev, it seemed like paradise.  Two of my cousins were born here, both doctors.  Their father was the only one in the family who had emigrated to America before the revolution.  After he had immigrated, one of his sisters wrote him about how hard life in Russia was at the time.  What she really meant, but couldn't spell out, was the threat of pogroms.  But he hadn’t understood and wrote back, “Don't think that life in America is easy, it's not.”  Five months later she was killed, buried alive with her five small sons.  And he bore a burden of guilt throughout his entire life.  “If at any time someone from Russia tells you that life in Russia is hard,” he told his sons, don't respond that it's hard here, too.  Because what they mean by ‘hard’ is an entirely different thing.”

My cousins are wonderful people, and they did their best to help us.  I don't think they understood precisely what we were going through.  Many Soviet people, when they come to America, are very needy.  So I think they were scared a bit.  But now, they’re the ones who keep calling us, inviting us over, asking why we don't call them.  Now they eagerly follow my tours with the orchestra.

From the beginning, I decided that I'd never be on welfare.  I realized that if I said to myself, even just once, “Come on, relax, there's nothing bad about it,” there would be no way out.  I often recalled this Russian folktale about two frogs who fell into a milk jar.  One of them gave up immediately, saying, “There is nothing I can do,” and she drowned. The other started moving around, trying to get out, until she whipped the milk into butter.  I wanted to be like this other frog.  I couldn't whip the butter yet, and I may never do it, but at least I'm trying.

 

I remember my first job in America.  I was supposed to hand out flyers on the bridge, above the Battery tunnel.  My English wasn't great at the time.  I was supposed to pass out flyers to truck drivers.  But I had never driven a car in my life.  I couldn't tell a truck from a cab.  My supervisor, an Indian guy, obviously didn't trust me very much.  He stood next to me on this bridge, watching what I did.  One time, a small car stopped next to me.  It was so small that even I was able to notice it wasn't a truck.  The driver asked me, “Can I have this paper?”  And I said, “No, this is only for the truck drivers.”  He reached into his pocket.  During the training session, we had all been warned that if somebody didn’t want a flyer, we should never insist, because he could draw a pistol and shoot.  So, when I saw that driver reaching for something in his pocket, I felt funny.  But what he took out was a quarter.  He handed it to me and said, “Lady, I'm giving you a good-citizen price.  Take it and give me the paper.”  So I took the twenty-five cents and gave him the flyer. When I turned around, I saw the Indian guy laughing so hard he had to hold his stomach.  Then he asked me, in this quiet, almost intimate voice: “Are you Jewish?” “How do you know?”  I answered. “Only a Jewish person can sell something that nobody wants to take for free,” he said, adding: “If you could sell this piece of paper, you will never be without a job.'' 

That's another thing I came to realize: if you do something professionally, you've got to be paid for it.  Otherwise, people don't take you seriously.  In my first year here, I didn't understand it.  I remember one day walking down the street in Brooklyn, carrying my instrument.  A man approached and introduced himself as the director of a school orchestra.  He asked me to play for the school but said he couldn't pay me: the school had no money and was trying to raise funds for its music program.  I agreed.  My husband and I gave a concert.  The principal of the school was there, along with some people from the Board of Education.  After the concert, they kept thanking and hugging me.  A year later, an old friend told me that he had gotten a call from that school.  They were looking for professional musicians who lived in Brooklyn.  About a year earlier, they told him, two people had come to play in their school, and the concert helped them to raise money for the music program.  But now that they could pay, they wanted professionals, not people from the street.

That taught us a good lesson.  In Russia we had gotten used to barter: you don't pay the doctor for treating you and he doesn't pay you for playing the violin.  Or a neighbor asks you to give music lessons to her son, and you refuse the money; so she brings you a box of chocolates instead.  But here it's different: if you don't accept money, then people think you're not a professional musician.  The more money you take, the better they think that you play.

I never stopped practicing.  And then I met a woman, an organist.  She suggested that we ask the Chamber Music Society to arrange a concert for us.  They asked us for a tape, a professional recording.  The recording was very expensive, fifty dollars for an hour of work.  For me, at the time, it was a lot of money.  But we agreed and decided to share the cost.  We found a sound engineer who had a studio, a Russian who had lived here for seventeen years.  I'll be grateful to him for the rest of my life – and my future life, too.  Everything good that happened to me in the next five years, I owe to him.  We had arranged to make the recording in a small church in Queens.  My friend was playing the organ, I was playing viola d'amore.  We had hoped to finish recording in an hour, playing nonstop, so that it wouldn’t cost more than fifty dollars.  As soon as we began to play, he stopped us and asked for my name.  “You don't have to pay me anything, Mela,” he said.  “I'll pay you, just to hear you play.”  So we made the recording and sent it to the manager of the Chamber Music Society.  Of course, he never even listened to the tape.

But I was lucky.  It happened that this sound engineer, Misha Liberman, was listening to the tape in his studio when he had a visit from the orchestra conductor that I'm working with now.   The conductor heard the tape and asked who it was.  Misha told him about me.  The conductor said, “I would like to meet this woman.”  And we met.  Because I played the viola d'amore on the tape, he was convinced I was a violist.  “I'm very impressed with your playing,” he said.  “Would you play just a few notes for me?'”  And I did.  After I had finished, he asked me to play with his orchestra in two weeks.  It was the Philharmonia Virtuosi, one of the finest chamber orchestras in New York.  I hadn’t told him I could play the violin.

I gave solo concerts, playing both viola and viola d'amore.  But one day – the way it happens in Hollywood – the concertmaster became sick, and there was nobody to play first violin.  “It's too bad you don't play the violin,” the conductor said.  And I replied, “Of course I play the violin.”  He was so surprised that I’d kept it a secret for two years.  But I couldn't tell him any sooner.  Competition was so intense among the musicians, and I felt I was, well, too strong for them.  I couldn't just say, “Here I am, and I can play violin and viola and viola d'amore.”  They would have killed me.  You have to respect the rules, especially if you're in another country. Anyway, it has worked out well.  I've been playing with the Philharmonia Virtuosi for five years now.

What I learned in this country is that one has to work hard in order to achieve something.  Another thing I learned is that so much is left to chance – as Americans put it, “being in the right place at the right time.”  Because the competition is so tough, being good at something is not always good enough.   

I travel a lot now, touring with the orchestra. We've been to the most remote parts of the world.  What we've seen in these past five years is enough to last a couple of lives.  So I don't have any regrets.  Still, I miss Russia terribly.  I miss the snow especially.  But I have a house in Canada now.  I went to Canada two years ago and found this house on an island.  Suddenly, there was everything I remembered so well from my childhood – only here it wasn't scary.  I decided it was time to stop being frightened. There is always a place for snow in your life.  It doesn't have to be in Russia.

Impressions Performed by soprano Andrea Bickford and pianist Migeun Chung

The poetry is by the 18-year-old Alice Ruth Moore before she became better know as Alice Dunbar Nelson.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

All the world through a window

On a snowy day like today, when taking a walk is just not on the agenda, the fact that I spend so much of my day looking at the world outside my house through one of five glass-covered rectangles becomes a little bit oppressive.

My first window view doesn't change that much when it is snowing, and being a normal window that is not attached to the outer world (beyond my yard and the street), I am not compelled to look at it (through it) for very long.

My second window is my iPad through which we see our children and grandchildren. The sweetest parts of the day were spent watching kids play and getting a tour of our daughter's new home. I am doing my Proust reading by way of an electronic copy (Michael has a paper copy, so our household is devoting a serious bit of shelf real estate to Proust already).

Then there is the television, through which I only saw a little bit of news today, and a YouTube video Michael found demonstrating a twenty-string harp guitar. Tonight I'll watch "The Honymooners" with Michael, and, if we stay awake, an episode of "Murphy Brown."

My fourth window is my cellphone, which didn't get much use today.

My fifth window is the computer. I put some music I'm writing (two-octave solo scale pieces for recorder and first position violin are on the docket today and for a sizable chunk of the future) into Finale on it, and I'm using it to write this blog post.

I listened to a not-yet-public video recording of some songs that I wrote last June, so my connection with the world through this computer window was rather personal, intimate, and emotional today. Listening provided a bit of time travel for me, reminding me of what I spent most of my trying-to-escape-from-the-news hours (waking and sleeping) thinking about back in May and June. 

And then there is the musical world "out there." It seems to be bustling, even without in-person concerts happening in places other than New Zealand and Australia. People are live-streaming recitals, making distanced videos, giving on-line tutorials, organizing music festivals, and, like me, writing music and practicing.  

Sometimes I feel that the musical world is like a freeway with a growing number of on-ramps, and a decreasing number of exits. Musicians seem to spend a great deal of time stuck in traffic, hoping to be able to make it to the next exit before running out of gas. We all look at one another in our cars, and imagine that everyone else is full of purpose and confident they will get "there" (wherever "there" is) because they give the impression online that they are.  

There is no way in the world that I can musically consume everything I encounter through this window. I need to remind myself that it is OK not to even try. I long for the days when the musical experience becomes "analog" again.  Practicing (which I have been doing today) and writing by hand (ditto) helps me feel less anxious about the musical world (and the extra-musical world as well).

So I will retire from this rectangle and go watch "The Honeymooners" on another.

Dorothy Fox Andante from 5 Pieces, Op. 11

What a treat it was to find this in my email today:



Here is the information that Phillip Sear put in the notes that accompany this video (copied here so that it might be found by other Fox hunters):

Phillip Sear plays a piece from around 1925 by the short-lived English composer K. Dorothy Fox (1894-1934).

There seems to be very little information available on K(alitha) Dorothy Fox. As you can see from her brief Wikipedia page she wrote a few pieces of piano and chamber music in her short life. She was born in Kensington, London, and must have been a prodigy, as her first piece was published at the age of just 12. She took her unusual first name from her mother, born Kaletha Marianne Childs. Some of her scores were published in Paris, and she was certainly living there around 1927 (her family seem to have moved overseas in the early 1900s), and she spent her last years living with a friend in Amersham, Bucks.

She died in a hotel in Windsor, Berkshire (she sadly hung herself with a silk scarf), having gone there to escape the noise from pneumatic drills at her home, and had some incomplete manuscripts with her at the time. The beneficiary of her will (and dedicatee of her viola sonata - see here for some programme notes from a 2017 performance (Ooh! that's a link to this blog!) was her brother Gerald Hugh Borlase Fox (1900-95). I put these details here in the hope that people with more information on her might find this description and be able to add to what is known of her life.

The '5 Pieces' were dedicated to another little-known British woman composer, and fellow member of the Society of Women Composers, the harpsichordist Dorothy Erhart (1894-1971).

My thumbnail shows a colourized detail from a photo in Amersham Museum of the 1934 Boxing Day hunt in the Broadway, an event Dorothy might well have witnessed as she was living in Amersham at the time.

And then there's this obituary from the Times that Mr. Sear sent:

INQUEST ON WOMAN COMPOSER

THE CORONER'S COMMENTS ON NOISE

The inquest was held at Windsor yesterday on the body of Miss K. Dorothy Fox, of Hyde Park Square, London, W., who was found hanging by a silk scarf at an hotel at Windsor on Saturday. She had been at the hotel about a fortnight, coming, is is stated, from a country town. Miss Fox was a talented composer, and a number of half-finished manuscripts were found in here luggage.

Dr. Edward Arthur Gibson, of Cleveland Square, London, said Miss Fox was 40 years old, and of independent means. Her father was abroad. She was highly strung, temperamental, and artistic.

The DEPUTY CORONER, Mr. J..A. Leonard, said that a quantity of drugs had been found in Miss Fox's room, and asked Dr. Gibson to say what they were.

Dr. Gibson examined several bottles and boxes and said they appeared to be harmless.

Miss Christabel Lowndes Yates, of Windsor House, Amersham, a novelist, said in evidence that Miss Fox had been living with her for about seven years. They met in France, where it was considered Miss Fox had only three months to live unless she could be looked after better. Miss Fox got better, but suffered from nerves. She had taken a medicinal on a doctor's prescription, but she had never threatened to take her life. She had, in fact, gone to the doctor's when she saw this drug on a list of dangerous drugs, and asked him if it would give her an urge in the direction of suicide. Thee witness did not know what the reply was, but the drug was not withdrawn.

Continuing, the witness said that Miss Fox was very small, and at one period only weighed 5st. 6oz. or 7oz. She was a very fine musician. Her work had been broadcast in several countries, and a concert of her work was given in London about a month ago, and another work was to be published in this country, France, and Germany. She was considered to be an extraordinarily promising composer. She had no love affairs so far as the witness knew, and no financial trouble.

"INCREDIBLE NOISE"

Miss Fox had left her house a fortnight before because oof the unbearable noise from the road repairs, the witness went on. There were about eight pneumatic drills, two engines, and other noisy things, and the vibration was so bad that they had to open the windows for fear they would be broken, dismantle the wireless, and pack up the piano and the china. They could not speak on the telephone. The noise was incredible. The witness received a letter from Miss Fox posted the night before her death, and it was perfectly cheerful and normal.

The CORONER--Do you think this pneumatic drill got on her nerves?

Miss Yates--While she was there, but I don't think so after she had gone

The CORONER said that a good deal of prominence had been given to Miss Fox's death, possibly from a feeling of indignation against "these nerve-shattering machines," which were one of the many tribulations of this age of noise. But he thought in this case the noise of the pneumatic drill was a very small link in the chain of events leading to Miss Fox's unhappy ending. It was evident that Miss Fox was of an artistic and perhaps somewhat neurotic temperament. He recorded a verdict of "Suicide while of unsound mind."

The U.S. Marine Band will perform music by Adolphus Hailstork at President Biden's Inauguration

I just learned that a new piece by Adolphus Hailstork will be performed at President Biden's inauguration tomorrow.

Norfolk, Va., Jan. 19, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A composition by Adolphus Hailstork, Eminent Scholar and professor emeritus of music at Old Dominion University, will be performed at Wednesday’s inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Fanfare on “Amazing Grace” is scheduled to be performed as the second piece of the inaugural prelude.

This marks just the second time that music by a contemporary African American composer has been selected to be part of the repertoire performed at a presidential inauguration, according to Africlassical.com, a website on African heritage in classical music. It is scheduled to be performed by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band.

Hailstork came to Old Dominion in 2000. He writes in a variety of forms and styles: symphonic works and tone poems for orchestra; two concertos (for piano and for violin) and numerous chamber works; duos for such combinations as horn and piano, clarinet and piano, flute and piano; numerous songs, including those for soprano, baritone, mezzosoprano, some with piano and others with orchestra or chamber group; band works and transcriptions; and many pieces for piano and pipe organ. He retired Jan. 1.

He is working on a requiem cantata for George Floyd, “A Knee on the Neck,” one of many compositions that reflect his engagement with Black history. He expects to complete it in April.

“My poet friend Dr. Herbert Martin (who also wrote the text for Hailstork’s cantata ‘Crispus Attucks’) one day sent me – I mean it was so fast, within a week of Floyd’s murder – a complete script and called it ‘A Requiem.’ And I looked at it and said, ‘I can use this,’ and started setting it,” Hailstork said in an interview with San Francisco Classical Voice in June. “It captures a lot of things that should be mentioned and are universal. That’s why the whole world is upset over watching that murder.”

Along with a University faculty research award, Hailstork has received the ALLI AWARD for lifetime achievement from the Cultural Alliance of Greater Hampton Roads, the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and the Charles O. and Elisabeth C. Burgess Award for Faculty Research and Creativity from ODU's College of Arts and Letters.

The University maintains the Adolphus Hailstork Collection in the special collections area of the F. Ludwig Diehn Composers Room in the Diehn Fine and Performing Arts Center.

Thinking about the Sea Shanty in 2021

I admit that I was amused when Stephen Colbert declared 2021 the year of the Sea Shanty the other night on A Late Show, but part of me cringed when I heard him encouraging Jon Batiste to join in the shanty craze.

The Sea Shanty was, after all, sung on merchant ships as they transported cargo back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean during the decades that preceded the American Civil War. And some of the "cargo" these ships carried below decks to America was human cargo, to be delivered to slave owners in America. And the cargo carried on the return trip across the Atlantic would have been the spoils of slave labor like tobacco and cotton.

Before you start thinking about spending your afternoon (or all of 2021) listening to sea shanties, have a glance at their origin story.

British Composer Lucy Hale

Before I learned of her death (from Covid-19 at the age of twenty-six) today, I had never heard of the very fine British composer Lucy Hale. I have been listening to some of her music here on Soundcloud, and feel so sad. To write music of this quality before the age of twenty-six is remarkable. To write music of this quality at any age is remarkable. I hope her music will be available (for publication or for upload into the IMSLP by her friends, family, and colleagues). I found a list of some of her works.

[Click for a larger view]

N.B. There happens to be a Lucy Hale who is an actress and pop music singer (same year of birth, but very different trajectory because of many factors), who has a huge on-line presence, which makes this Lucy Hale harder to find in the internets.

JANUARY 12th UPDATE: Here is a wonderful tribute to Lucy Hale by Becky Morris Knight of Drake Music.

Superb readings of all of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in animated graphical videos

Stephen Malinowski has completed his thirty-five-year-long project of making animated graphical scores for exquisite for all ninety-six pieces in the WTC. You can enter the treasure trove to read about the project here, or you can go directly to the youtube playlists through the links in the next paragraph.

Malinowski uses recordings made by the pianist Kimiko Ishizaka for Book I, and uses recordings made by the harpsichordist Colin Booth for Book II.

Here is a screenshot of some of the thumbnails:

Beethoven Matters in 2021

I'm trying to be hopeful for this new year. I feel like I have really lowered the "bar" for what I want. So many of the things I used to worry about (or at least be concerned with) matter so little, and so many of the things I used to take for granted (like being able to play music with people and spend cold days indoors with friends, being able to visit our children and our grandchildren) seem virtually unattainable. 

And it is all due to people who willingly invite this virus into their lungs by attending (and creating) unmasked indoor events, and willingly transmit it to the lungs of others because they feel they are making a political statement. Or something. 

Since March 14th I have worn a mask every time I have gone anywhere that required me to share air with others. I have been doing everything in my power to help lift the spirits of my fellow musicians. I have practiced every day with the goal that when I emerge from this isolation I will be a better player and will contribute more to the music that I play with and for others. But this is going on too long. And too many people are getting sick, and too many people have died. Too many people will die this evening, and too many people will die tomorrow. 

I'm holding out hope for the Biden administration to speed up the delivery of vaccines and to convince 70% of the population to take them, and to wear masks and continue to practice social distancing even if they have become vaccinated. I'm working my way through the Beethoven Violin Sonatas while I wait; and the C minor Sonata (Number 7) is currently providing me that wonderful combination of solace and challenge that helps take my mind off my troubles, which are also our (as human beings and as musicians) troubles. 

In the middle of everything that we have experienced during 2020, it has still been a Beethoven year. I have spent nearly every day of it practicing one piece of Beethoven or another, and have learned a great deal about music and about violin playing during my year-long celebration of this 250th year since his birth. Now that 2020 has officially ended, I still have Beethoven's music on my stand. I'm making my way through his Violin Sonatas with new eyes and ears (because of all the other Beethoven pieces I have been practicing), and with a better command of left-hand technique and bow control (because these things grow when you practice music that demands them to grow). 

Because of all the revelations about racism and sexism in musical institutions, and the "sudden" realization (after people quietly and not so quietly mentioning it for decades) that the majority of repertoire programmed by professional orchestras, opera companiees, and chamber ensembles prior to 2020 was written by dead, white, male composers, there have been musicologists who have claimed that Beethoven should no longer be important.

I believe that the more we understand about what music is, what music does, and what music can be and can do, the more we understand that Beethoven has a special kind of relevance that transcends time, style, era, and gender. I admit that it is vital to vary our musical fare, but there are times when we need to reach for the Beethoven in order to understand what we are experiencing as human beings. Particularly now.

When this pandemic is behind us, I'm hoping that I will remember 2020 more as the year I spent practicing Beethoven every day than as the year I had to stop playing concerts and playing chamber music. Rather than the year I started wearing a mask when I went outside, I would like to think of it as the year I started becoming confident about teaching remotely. I wrote more music this year than in any other year of my life, and had more contact with musicians in far away places that seem to enjoy playing and singing what I have written.