Solidaridad plays "Chee Buenos Aires"

What a tango band! What an exceptional video!

Four Coliloquies for Flute and Oboe

This is a video from a March 27th concert that is part of the (this year virtual) 5th Annual International Music by Women Festival. The flutist is Rebecca Johnson, and the oboist is Elizabeth Sullivan.

It is a really windy day on the prairie today, so I thought it would be a good day to share this video (which is cued to begin when this piece begins). The fourth "coliloquy" poses a question about where the wind comes from, and where the wind goes.


You can follow the music here, if you like.

"A Tunes" on Amazon

I can't believe I'm posting this, but, since I am engaging in commerce with this educational opus, I'm pleased to say that "A Tunes" has made it into the vast (and reviewable) world of Amazon. You can see the entry in all its "prime" glory, with a "look-inside" feature here.

It also has a ranking (which I hope will go up one of these days). Bear in mind that this is day one for this listing.

I hope that people familiar with my work will leave a comment!

Marcel Proust, guest blogger

I have rarely come across writing about music that is so about music itself.

. . . just so I found my bearings in this music which was new to me, and recognized the landscape of the Vinteuil sonata; and, more wonderful than any girl, the little phrase, wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and soft as scarves, came towards me, still recognizable under these new ornaments. My joy at meeting it again was increased by the familiar, friendly tone in which it spoke to me, so persuasive, so simple, yet allowing its rich, shimmering beauty to unfold in all its splendour. Its purpose this time, however, was simply to show me the way, a different path from that of the sonata, for this was a different, hitherto unperformed work by Vinteuil, where he had simply chosen to make an allusion (explained at this point by a note in the programme which we should have had before us) by introducing, just for a moment, the little phrase. Having been recalled for a moment in this way, it disappeared and I found myself in an unknown world once more, but I now knew, and everything I heard confirmed, that this was one of the worlds that I had not even imagined Vinteuil could have created; for when, tiring of the sonata, whose universe was exhausted for me, I tried to imagine others equally beautiful but different, I simply did as those poets do who fill their imagined Paradise with meadows, flowers and rivers duplicating those on Earth. What I now heard caused me as much joy as the sonata would have done if I had not known it; that is to say, it was just as beautiful, but different. Whereas the sonata opened on a lily-like dawn in the country, dividing its floating whiteness but only to attach it to the light but thick tangle of a rustic bower of honeysuckle and white geraniums, the new work took off on a stormy morning over flat, level surfaces like those of the sea, amid an acid silence, in an infinity of emptiness, and then it was in a rosy dawn that this unknown universe began to be built before me, drawn out of silence and night. This new, red light, so absent from the tender, rustic and candid sonata, tinged all the sky, as dawn does, with a mysterious hope.

This passage, and the passages surrounding it from "The Prisoner," the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time brings to my mind and ear the absolutely delightful Saint-Saëns Septet, Opus 65:

Listen to Daniel Gianola-Norris play my Sonata for Trumpet and Piano!

Scott Hostetler, Scott Hostetler, and Scott Hostetler Play Poulenc!

Virtue and Music

I grew up in a world where musical competence was social currency. I came up with the idea that people play the way they are, and the more they practice, the more they play the way they are. Being rather naive, and making my young way in a musical world filled with grown-up musicians who were at the very top of the profession, I believed this to be true.  I expected that the grown-up musicians who played beautifully and brilliantly must be kind, moral, and virtuous people, regardless of what kinds of things I was told about them that could cause me to believe otherwise.

I spent years practicing so that I could get better, but, like most people, I had personal limitations that I simply couldn't transcend. To add insult to injury I took the phrase, "You are only as good as your last performance" to heart. It was only through changing instruments, working carefully and methodically for the past thirty years to build a technique, and learning how to solve problems my students have encountered, that I have been able to begin too grow through what I believed were personal limitations.  I know that I have become a better violinist, violist, teacher, and composer than I was a year ago, and I am grateful that I will continue to work and grow. 

My adult experience totally debunks my childish idea that people are the way they play. My new "catch phrase" is "the more carefully and consistently you practice, the more beautifully and consistently you will play." And my goal is to learn things from every "last performance," and to do better the next time.

This kind of musical mental health is hard won, particularly when music is (and always has been) so personal to me. It is not just something I "do."  A good friend who knows me well told me that music is my "transition object," serving as the major substitute for the love that I lacked as a child. I can create it and bring it to life myself, and I can construct within in it a world where truth and virtue reign supreme. As CEO of my work, I am in a position to make decisions about everything (at least while I am practicing and writing). I find total joy in doing my work. It is my way of finding amour-propre, a word I recently learned from reading Proust. And, best of all, I don't need to seek approval for what I already know is as good as I can make it be. Good enough for me is good enough. And it is up to me to raise my own standards.

Early on I learned that giving love feels very similar to receiving love, and since making music is how I habitually experience love, sharing music is the best way of expressing it. That is why I write music for people, and that is why I share most of what I write in the IMSLP. I feel balanced when I have a writing, arranging, or performing project in the works (and I feel out of balance when I don't). A piece of music isn't complete for me unless it has been played or heard by someone else. 

I was unaware the extent to which many of those great musicians I used to believe must be kind and virtuous used their feelings of superiority to "thrust" their greatness "upon" younger musicians who wanted to find their way in the professional musical world. My (more attractive than I was) female friends at Juilliard often believed that their accomplished older seducers (and would-be seducers) believed in their musical talent and their intelligence. I somehow got the message (told to me in no uncertain terms by my teacher, Julius Baker) that in order to be successful as a musician a woman needed to be attractive. Capitalizing on the way I looked in order to be successful in music was not a game I was equipped to play. I considered myself limited then. Now I consider myself fortunate.

I think that in 2021 we have started to open the door on a kinder and more equal musical world. Perhaps this pandemic year, where musicians see one another through "windows" into their houses, and everyone is trying their best to find sanity during a year when direct musical contact with people who listen to music happens mostly through electronic devices, and rarely in real time; and direct musical contact between musicians is rare, masked, distanced, and careful. 

From our "doorstep" we see more and more revelations about the abuse of power from musicians considered virtuous by some (Levine, Gelb, for example), and we see the beginnings in the musical community of an institutional intolerance for sexism and racism. We also see that celebrating "greatness" might just be an outdated nineteenth-century idea (consider Wagner and his circle). I wonder if we are at the beginning of an era where kindness and decency will have greater currency among musicians who play, conduct, and compose, and teach because of the hundreds of excellent musicians who could easily fill the shoes of those musicians who do not conduct their personal lives that the quality of their playing  (or writing) suggests has virtue.

Kenneth Woods on James Levine

Reflecting on the life and career of James Levine has been difficult to do. Kenneth Woods has done the difficult task, and has written the spot-on blog post about James Levine that everyone should read.  You can read it here.

Cello Tuesday with Diane Chaplin

This livestreaming concert includes a performance of "A Cellist's Garden of Verses."

Sondheim's "No one is Alone" performed by Elena Snow-Evrad and Beatriz Helgura-Snow

This was exactly the song I needed to hear this morning. And in this performance its message is so very clear.

Adoration in Memphis

What a great emotional experience it was to hear the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra my brother Marshall played in for most of his career, play my arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration" to open their first concert after a year of silence due to Covid. You can listen to the concert here. The "Adoration" begins about 13 minutes in, after a stellar "Star-spangled Banner" played by the concertmaster.

Thank you, Augustin!

I'm really loooking forward to hearing Augustin Hadelich's recording of the complete Bach Sonatas and Partitas which is coming out on CD next month. He put this video of the Largo from the Third Sonata (the C major) on YouTube today, and in four minutes and eleven seconds all the thoughts that have spent the day buzzing around my brain are now calm and organized. Thank you, Augustin. Thank you Johann Sebastian.

Imagining an alternate reality

I suppose musicians everywhere have been reflecting on the year that we have lived in a musical reality that has mostly happened through communication through microphones, recording devices, and screens. It was not the way I expected things to be. I did a search on this blog for posts that I have made that contain the phrase "live music," because I recall I pretty much stopped listening to recordings after I stopped writing CD reviews for the American Record Guide. Looking back at this year I wonder how I would have survived without the technology (any and all of it) that I used to disparage.

I am fortunate that I can hear music in its natural state (i.e. not translated into impulses and played through speakers) when I practice by myself or when I play with Michael. I feel fortunate that when the weather was still warm I was able to play a little bit of chamber music outside.

The most intimate indoor musical connections I have been able to make with people outside of my two-person household this year have been with my students (giving lessons through FaceTime) and working with people via Zoom (mostly) who are performing music I have written. The kind of contact I have had with performing musicians this year has been amazing. Before the Pandemic I rarely had this kind of contact. But now that we are all working from our homes it happens all the time. I never before imagined sitting, for example, in on a rehearsal in London in order to hear a rehearsal of a piece I wrote intended to be performed over the internet.

Would all this have happened anyway? Absolutely not. Would I have spent the year writing so much solo music? Probably not. Would I even have considered writing duets that could be played remotely? I wouldn't have had a good reason to.

I also understand more about the intimate communication that happens between a composer and a person playing a piece of music. It is truly a magical form of communication where marks on a page can translate something I make at my end into something that comes out sounding pretty much the same when played by another person I have never met who lives somewhere else. And there are no electronics involved in the communication. Just an eloquent system of musical notation that transcends time, space, and language.

I wonder how musical life will look when enough of the people on the planet have been vaccinated, and when life goes back to that new normal we are looking at somewhere along the horizon through different sets of binoculars (some more rose-colored than others). I hope that high school orchestra teachers will still let me into their rehearsals. I hope that what musicians have learned about supporting one another will stay with us, because times are always difficult for musicians. Egos are fragile in our business, and they are also omnipresent. So is hierarchy and the resulting marginalization.

We have been able to discuss sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry in the world of "classical" music with relative ease from behind a screen, but when we are "back" in real time and real space, will people continue to speak out when they observe behavior that is discriminatory?

I hope that the fortunate people who live in cities and have busy rehearsal and concert schedules will remember that there are dedicated composers (like me) who live outside of major metropolitan areas, and I hope that people who write on social media about how much they love hearing live music will come to concerts in more rural communities (like mine). I hope that my neighbors will come out to the concerts that my musical partners and I are so very eager to play.

We musicians (who by necessity spend a large amount of time in isolation anyway) really miss playing for people. It is in playing for people that we feel connected, and, if all goes well, we can help the people listening to one another. 

Music happens in (real) time and in (physical) space. Music travels in the air, and vibrates in the spaces between people. Playing music for people is not about the affirmation of ability (which is really the result of hard work). It is about the sharing the experience of air that is enriched with vibration. It is about the people who are listening hearing phrases and feeling rhythm at the same time as the people setting the sound in motion.

I wonder what it will be like to play concerts again?

March 13th marks one year of isolation for me. In 2020 it was a Friday. I played for a funeral that afternoon, and then played for Shabbat services that night. The first case in our county was reported that day, and one of the first people to get sick from Covid-19 was a member of the family holding the funeral. It feels like it was such a long time ago, but I remember that afternoon and evening so very well.

"Adoration" performed by violinist Laura Colgate and pianist Elizabeth Hill

I love hearing the different ways that people play my transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration," and was particularly moved by this recording. What a thrill it is to have this piece chosen by the National Philharmonic to celebrate the begininning of this year's Women's History Month.

VIII Arachnida

Eight pitches in this tarantella! Thank you for such a great reading of it, Patricia Garcia!