Bows Down

Most violinists and violists of normal adult size can balance their bows in their laps when asked to do so, but my short legs make it very difficult for me. In the case of a tall chair and a whole movement, like the Scherzo of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, it is impossible.

I don't feel comfortable wearing heels and carrying an instrument onto a stage, so the other day I developed a useful no-sew (and no shoe) solution. The components:

Two old black socks with the feet cut off
Two black hair ties
A few wine bottle corks (for heft)

I put the sock parts inside one another and cuffed them on either side. Then I inserted the corks, and bound the cuffed ends together with the hair ties. This is what the finished (and unnamed) tool looks like:

And here is how it works:

It only takes up a little room in my case:

You Never Know

After an orchestra rehearsal yesterday morning, I found myself in a lengthy parking-garage conversation about music with a young man who had recently decided to augment his musical life as a freelancer and teacher by doing music-related things involving technology.

I really enjoy being able to talk with younger musicians (people younger than my own kids, even), and find myself deeply impressed at how capable, enthusiastic, and dedicated so many of them are to the this activity that we pass, torch-like, from one generation to the next. When we get the opportunity to make music together, the result is often, as in the concert last night, a big emotional and artistic bonfire, fueled by a lot of attention and concentration. It seems that as an orchestral musician, age really doesn't matter. And at sixty-two I still have a lot to talk about with people thirty or forty years younger than I am. I also learn a great deal from sitting with truly capable young stand partners, some, in the case of this concert, with remarkable bow arms.

At any rate, I mentioned at some point that I wrote music. My new friend asked me what my last name was, wondering if he had ever heard of me. I told him that he probably hadn't, but when I mentioned my name there was a moment of recognition. He reached in his bag, took out a notebook of orchestra music that he was helping a student with, and produced the bass part of "High Speed Rail," a piece I wrote about ten years ago.

String Theory, the Mind of God, and Phrasing

While listening to a podcast conversation today between Michio Kaku and Alan Alda, I got an abstract glimpse of what string theory is, how string theory works, and how string theory relates to music. At any rate, I want to share the link here, just in case it is an interesting subject for anyone who reads this blog, and so I can be sure to know where it is in the universe of the internet when I want to listen again.

Here it is.

I started getting little awareness "pings" that relate to the way musical phrases are curved like physical space is curved, and how what I might have to rethink what I sometimes think of as "gravity" in phrases. And I can't stop thinking about Johann Sebastian Bach's curved beams.

Back in the Orchestral Viola Saddle

I played a family-friendly pops concert yesterday with the Champaign Urbana Symphony. It was a Covid-safe space with everybody in the orchestra vaccinated and with all the string players and the audience members masked.

In rehearsal we had to explore logistics, like coordinating bell covers along with trumpet muting and wind instrument changes, but otherwise it felt like a normal and well-organized couple of rehearsals.

It has been a long five hundred some-odd days (some odder than others), and I found that playing as a masked ensemble for a masked audience was perfectly comfortable.

Nobody could see the smiles coming from everyone's mouths, but we could feel them.

It was so inspiring to be sitting in the middle of excellent orchestration--hearing and feeling the brass players behind me, the winds, to the right, and the excellent strings all around.

I was concerned in the middle of the first piece, a Sound of Music medley, that I was going to start crying and get my mask all wet. I know that I wasn't alone.

And when it came time to go to sleep after such a stimulating day, I had one piece after another going through my head, just like in the old days. And I am still having spots that pop up here and there.

The next time I get to play, with another orchestra, is only two weeks away. And I get to play Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony for the first time as a violist, so I have two weeks to practice. I was so excited to find all the musical material that the violas get to play.

I wouldn't say that this aspect of life is "back to normal." I would say that I am experiencing orchestral musical life with a new sense of joy and purpose.

Beethoven's Kol Nidre

This is beautifully described in a 1971 letter to the editor of the New York Times

TO THE EDITOR:
Joseph Roddy's piece on the Guarneri Quartet (“The New ‘In’ Group Is the Guarneri,” March 7), refers to the adagio of Beethoven's Quartet in C minor, Opus 131. Michael Tree, the group's violist, in response to some friendly joking about his playing “Jewish” in this movement, is quoted as saying, “Look, this is the Jewish movement. Beethoven took this from a synagogue... It is very well documented.” Since neither Mr. Tree nor Mr. Roddy indicated what this documentation is, may I point out that what one hears in the opening bars of the adagio is the 1,300‐year‐old “Kol Nidre” melody which is chanted in all or most synagogues on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) Leo Tolstoy, I might add, once described the “Kol Nidre,” which he had heard in a Russian synagogue, as the “saddest, yet most uplifting” of all the melodies he had ever encountered, ethoing, as it does, “the story of the great martyrdom of a grief‐stricken nation” According to Abraham Idelson in his book, Jewish Music In Its Historical Development, Beethoven's use of the melody is probably related to the request by Viennese Jews in 1825 that he compose a cantata for the dedication of the new Reform Temple. Actually, Idelson points out, Beethoven was considering the request, but somehow never got around to it. Then, a year later, Opus 131 saw the light. Undoubtedly, in earlier times, members of such outfits as the Joachim String Quartet and the Budapest String Quartet must have noticed the remarkable similarity between the Jewish melody and the opening measures of the Beethoven adagio, but the first to call attention to it in print was Emil Rreslaur, in Leipzig in 1898 in his book on the ancient origins of synagogue and secular Jewish song.

There it is, abstracted and contracted, in the very short (twenty-eight measures long) sixth movement of Opus 131:

A Tale of Two Cities

In 2017 a new used bookstore opened up on the Charleston square. The owner, who owned the largest used bookstore in Chicago, moved to Charleston (by way of Arkansas) to raise his family in a more rural place. He had also gone to college in Charleston, and had fond memories of the friendly and intellectually offbeat community he encountered here.

I stopped into the bookstore shortly after it opened. Joe, the owner, told me how much he loved the college radio station when he was a student, and that he was having difficulty finding it. All he could get was a "top 40" station.

The radio station he remembered was the one that I worked at during the 1980s and 1990s. It turned into a "hit mix" station right after I left. Sometimes we think that the fixtures in a place will remain there after we leave. But places change, and too many of the fixtures live only in our memory of a place.

Joe's bookstore (called Bob's Books, after his father) made a huge impact on the community. Before it got filled with books, there was space large enough for our Collegium to play a concert there. We even gained a new member that evening because a recorder player from Germany, who had just moved to the area, stopped into the bookstore that evening, and heard our concert. It was such a moment of serendipity.

Joe had to move from the square because of safety issues, but he found a great new location accross the street from the university. After a couple of years the owner of the new building suddenly forced him to move, and he found a new location just off the square in a shaded building adjacent to a coffee shop. It was a perfect location. He moved during the first several months of the pandemic, and was eventually able to open up the store to people who wore masks.

I just learned that Joe has suddenly moved his family to Chicago, and is in the process of moving his bookstore there. I imagine it is because of the people who live around here who refuse to wear masks. I imagine that with all Joe's best intentions to try to give something of value to a city that existed, in part, in his nostalgic memory, it became a full-time job for him to have to deal with people who thought they had a right to go into his store without wearing masks.

It is astounding to me that despite a state mandate for masks, and signs on doors of businesses requiring masks, so few businesses are willing to enforce mask-wearing.

We will miss Joe and his bookstore, and I trust that he will be successful and will be safer and happier in Chicago.

After our first visit to Charleston in 1985 (we came here from Boston in order to look for a place to live), we made a list of a hundred things to like about Charleston. Michael was welcomed by a lively English department, and I was welcomed by a musical community that was happy to have me. Michael put in a good thirty years of teaching before the governor-assisted decline of the university and its enrollment (to put things politely), and I was able to create a baroque ensemble (back in my flute-playing days), work at a radio station, help form a string quartet, go to graduate school, help form a Renaissance consort, and help form a summer string orchestra. Together we live in a house that we really like (after doing a lot to improve it), and enjoy the natural beauty of the area.

We have raised two children, developed some strong friendships, and have participated in many community activities. But it seems to me that most of what we have done for the community is of our own making. We have given more than we have taken, which in most circumstances seems like a good formula for happiness. But so much of what was here has gone away, leaving some shared memories (some good, and some not so good).

And after thirty odd years (some odder than others) this is still home. And I still hope that things can change for the better, even if there is nowhere to buy books in town.

The Beholder's Share and Music?

I just learned about Alois Rigel's idea about the importance of the viewer when considering the "life" of a piece of art. He calls this the "beholder's share." Here is an excellent video that explains the idea in visual terms.

Here is an article by Anne Sherwood Pundyk that discusses the work of Erik Kandel, the person from whom I learned, via Alan Alda's "Clear and Vivid" podcast, about the whole idea.

The question of how music, a thing that happens in time, relates to this stuff is complicated, and it is really difficult to delve into it without encountering a great deal of the kind of philosophy I have trouble understanding. But I did find this paper by Robert Williams that I would share, simply because I brought up the question.

Can we each bring our individual life experiences into listening to a piece of music the way we can when looking at a piece of visual art? Do we only bring our musical experiences into the experience of music, or does the music itself bring experiences to mind that we hadn't been conscious of?

Some of us do not feel the need to interpret what we hear (allowing it to function as background sound), while others are incapable of listening without paying full attention. And then a whole barnyard of interpretive tools come into play from each of our lives as musicians and as listeners for each listening experience.

Then there is the difference among performing musicians between what one person sees on the page (which itself contains lots of visual-art-related information, along with language information) and what another person sees on the page, and how that person chooses to apply her or his own sense of phrasing, grouping, gradations of tonal color, gradiations of dynamics, gradiations of articulation, and a whole slew of other factors to play a given piece to any number of "beholders," both seen and unseen. If the beholder happens to be a recording device, does it render the player and the beholder one, or does it split the player and beholder into two distinct parts. So many questions.

Viola or Cello Adoration

My violin and piano transcription of Florence Price's Adoration can certainly be played on the viola or the cello, but it is far more viola-or-cello-friendly when transposed down a whole step to C major. Hannah Barton and Michael Finlay put a beautiful video of this version played on viola that I would like to share here.

You can find the viola part here, and the piano score (with the cello part) here.

Evening in Paris

This is the first piece of "Two Places in Illinois." It is a nostalgic look at the Paris of the past.



I got some of these images from a 1908 City Directory that I found by way of Archive.org. I also found a short history of the city, which was once a booming railroad town during the days when you could get almost anywhere by train.

Coles County August 2020 and 2021

The natural world of Coles County, Illinois comes to a bright crescendo in August: everything is blooming, hopping, and buzzing. I wrote an optiminstic piano piece last August to celebrate the physical beauty of the place where I live. Writing it helped to offset the omnipresence of the pandemic. Oh those innocent days of the early virus!

Revisiting the piece in August of 2021, now that vaccines have FDA approval and are freely and readily available to everyone over the age of twelve, could have been rewarding and kind of triumphant.

But the virus is now much more infectious, and too many of the residents of Coles County choose to remain unvaccinated. Many of the adult residents of the county still will not wear masks in public indoor spaces. They still don't believe (for whatever reason) that Covid-19, particularly in its strengthened Delta state, is something to be concerned about.

But the flowers are blooming, and the trees are rich with bird life, bird songs, insect life, and insect songs.

My friend Marjorie takes beautiful photographs during her daily walks, and shares them with her friends. Yesterday I made a video using my "Coles County August" piece and photographs from some of Marjorie's August 2021 walks.

Atlas Moth

This is the first piece in a forthcoming book of scale pieces in first position that will be published by Mel Bay later this year or in 2022. Like "Weights and Measures," this set goes through all the major and minor keys, moving stepwise with repeated pitches that happen only at the unison or the octave. Working this way gave me a some sense of structure during the first wave of the pandemic, and now making videos is giving me some structure during this Delta wave, where it is more like a sunami here in the lower parts of Illinois.

I call this collection "Scale Tales," because each scale corresponds to an animal that has scales like moths and butterflies, birds, fish, lizards, turtles, and flying squirrels (!!!).

The second volume (again with scales in all the major and minor keys, but using the full range of the violin) will probably carry the title "Advanced Scale Studies," but it is structured the same way.

Bruch Four Pieces from Opus 84

This recently digitized recording from a Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert given on December 1, 1974 somewhere in Boston (Jordan Hall or Sanders Theater, possibly) of four of Max Bruch's eight pieces for viola, clarinet, and piano (published in 1910 as Opus 84) is incredibly beautiful. We get to hear clarinetist Harold Wright, pianist Gilbert Kalish, and violist Burton Fine (my father) play chamber music the way I remember chamber music sounding when I was growing up. In the course of adulthood I thought that I might have had an inflated nostalgic memory of how beautifully my father and his colleagues played these Bruch pieces.

Now, when I listen with the ears of an adult musician as well as with the ears of a violist, I find that their playing is even more beautiful than I remembered it to be.

I imagine that you, my blog-reading friends, will share my enthusiasm.

An Afternoon with Doktor Faustus

My Four Pieces from Doktor Faustus was included in a program celebrating the viola d'amore music mentioned in the Thomas Mann novel.

I am happy to share the recording of my piece from this July 11th, 2021 performance by Gertrud Schmidt (viola d'amore) and Gero Körner (piano) that was given in the Saal Hütten in Roetgen-Rott in Germany. You can listen on the IMSLP Page (where you can find the music) or through these links:

1. Abendmusik
2. Hetaere esmeralda
3. Interlude
4. Echo

You can also read all about music in the novel in this open-access book (in German) by Anna Maria Olivari.

Alan Alda's Seven Questions

Michael and I have admired Alan Alda's work for a long time, but we only recently found out about his Clear+Vivid podcast. We are now faithful listeners.

At the end of each interview/episode Alda asks his guest a set of questions. Michael has answered them on his blog, and he suggested that I answer them here on my blog. So I will

What do you wish you really understood?

How ever-so-slight changes in the way you look at a situation or problem can change your relationship to that problem or situation completely and permanently.

How do you tell someone that they have their facts wrong?

I try to be direct and gentle. I don't back down, but I try not to argue.

What’s the strangest question anyone has ever asked you?

This one? I really never think of questions as strange, though many questions that I get from people who don't already know me personally involve accidentals, which could be considered strange out of the context of someone who writes music. I do remember that once, when I was a teenager, someone asked me if I wanted to scramble (meaning to leave wherever we were), and I thought it was an odd question because I had never heard "scramble" used in that context. I can't remember my response.

How do you stop a compulsive talker?

By trying to lead the conversation to a place s/he knows nothing about, and keeping it there.

How do you strike up a real, genuine conversation?

By posing direct and specific questions at first, listening, and responding with more questions. Eventually the conversation involves questions that I respond to, and when all goes well the conversation goes into a series of "dances" that do not involve questions or answers.

What gives you confidence?

I feel confident when there is a flowing ease--in music or in conversation. I feel confident when I know someone is listening and not judging, arguing, or preparing what s/he is planning to say next. The inverse of this destroys my confidence.

What book changed your life?

One Morning in Maine. It was the first multi-sensual reading experience for me, where even the color of the ink helped me to feel sensations of taste and smell, of sea and air, of ice-cream and clam chowder, and the sensation of having a loose tooth. I could say it changed my life because it changed the way I read.

Jacques Barzun, Guest Blogger (again)

This comes from Music in America Life (1956). It still rings true after 66 years. I have reinforced it with links, which I'm sure Barzun would appreciate.

Music in the literary fallacy Neither composers nor listeners nor—reprehensibly—the critics seem to appreciate the extent to which their convictions depend on the deceptive charm of words. "Absolute" music gives comfort, "pure" art gives nobility, by the mere name on the label—just like a patent-medicine. Writings about music are weighted down with traditional errors embodied in familiar phrases. All references, for example, to musical logic, to its kinship with mathematics, to its suitability as a universal language, to its total separateness from other arts, to its immateriality and meaninglessness, are old catchwords with no shadow of validity. They are repeated, however with unanimity of a flock of crows on a telegraph wire by all the educated men and women who address themselves in speech or in print to the delicate particular questions of modern and classical music.

The contrasts of music with literature are especially absurd, in that they show the speakers have never given a moment‘s thought to the questions: what is the literary effect, what is the pleasure of literature? before they contrast that art with their notion of the pleasure and effect of music. They assume that literature does not differ from what they experience in reading the morning paper or the instructions on the bottle—whence their views about meaning in words and in music, and mutatis mutandis, meaning in pictures, dancing, etc.

The one important difference between literature and the other art is external and consists in the fact that literature has developed a fairly rich vocabulary of criticism, whereas the other arts flounder about in technicalities mixed with bad metaphors. The music critic’s second pressing task is therefore the development of an adequate, precise, non-technical vocabulary for describing without sentimental or fanciful imagery what happens in music, as well in as in his mind while he listens. This is a continuing obligation which carries with it the duty of criticizing the question-begging, fallacy-breeding vocabulary now in use.

To date, the most encouraging attempt to fashion a proper speech for discussing music is Mr. Robert Erickson’s The Structure of Music (Noonday, N.Y. 1955). But in speaking of this desideratum to the literate connoisseur in one’s circle, one encounters great resistance to the idea that any need exist. When the need is shown, the second lot of resistance is that a language of criticism for music is an impossibility. When fragments of such a language are pointed to as already in use, the third entrenchment of the stubborn is that talking about music destroys its essence and robs the listener of his enjoyment. One must then give assurances that the intention is not to make critical talk a substitute for attendance at concerts, but simply a means of greater pleasure before an after—it being obvious the talk (and writing) about music is already a massive occurrence which nothing is going to stop.

The distinction between sound criticism and "music itself" is no different from that between intelligent discourse and any other activity. The distinction applies to life itself which is meant to be lived and talked about. People read about painting and baseball and old silver without failing into the error of supposing that a paragraph is the same thing as a canvas, a home run, or a teapot. The fact, then, that music lovers fear words is not the result of greater devotion but of a more muddled mind.

This would harm none but themselves if our acceptance of a high art were unself-conscious or, as we say, traditional. But as we just saw, it is highly self-conscious and demanding. Like Lydia in The Lady of the Aroostook, the interested public "wants to know." It wants to know whether something is atonal or surrealistic or Native American or expressive of dialectical materialism. And this is what justifies the criticism of criticism. Unguarded, the public takes in but little more than homeopathic doses of newspaper reviewing and program notes, and only adds to its own confusion when it makes an effort to escape it.

The use of words can lead to over-intellectualizing and desiccation, no doubt. But this is a danger chiefly to the composer and performer, who are often ruined by "getting ideas." The point of a fit critical vocabulary is not necessarily to increase anyone’s stock of ideas; only to put better order among those he has, so that they will not stand in the way of intelligent perception. The most articulate critic will willingly join the great inarticulate creator in keeping absolutely quiet while music unfolds its meaning in its own medium; and afterward both may be disposed to approve of the words of Lowell Mason when, having found the first Academy of music in this country, he prepared a teaching manual:

Music is almost the only branch of education aside from divine truth whose direct tendency is to cultivate the feelings. Our systems of education generally proceed too much on the principle that we are merely intellectual beings. . . . Hence we often find the most learned the least agreeable.

As we cry "Here! Here!" and echo Mason‘s conviction that vocal music "tends to improve the heart" one mentally measures the distance between his pioneer call to song in the mighty answer it has received. One thinks of his indefatigable colleagues and successors who labored for a century before seeing results in keeping with their enthusiasm, skill, and patience: Mason‘s contemporary old Anton Heinrich, who tried in vain to acclimate Beethoven in Kentucky; Sidney Lanier, the Southern poet-musician who wrote so justly of the two arts; Theodore Thomas and the Damrosch family to whom we owe the founding of our orchestral eminence; William Henry Fry, journalist and composer and gadfly; Jerome Hopkins, the heroic organizer and critic, who yet managed to composing voluminously; MacDowell and Griffes, who still speak to us in their native tongue; Victor Herbert, the born entertainer who also fight for the creator’s rights; T. W. Surette and Archibald Davison, who revolutionized the school repertory; and Koussevitzky who made Boston the trying ground for modern American music. Often isolated and misunderstood and and even misguided, they none the less brought us where we are.

It was a hundred years ago this year that Whitman told an unheeding world: "I hear America Singing." If he returned today, he would find this hopeful baseless metaphor turned into a living truth.

Jacques Barzun July 1955

You can read another passage from this book here.