Woodwind music in the IMSLP and Viola music in the IMSLP

I have started taking stock of the music that I keep in the IMSLP, and made a couple of lists, which I am sharing here. You can find links to all the viola music here, though this link includes published music as well, and for the Woodwind music through the main Thematic Catalog page, and use the sidebar links for the various instruments.

From Christopher Simpson's The Division Viol

I welcome possible explanations from anyone who understands something about astrology. These pages come from Simpson's 1655 treatise on making divisions on a ground.

Well . . . I did a little search, and found that I posted this very image back in October 2012 in a post about a division project I was involved in coordinated by Daniel Wolf and a bunch of other composers in the blogosphere.

Price Adoration on Trumpet

One of the perks of making arrangements available in the IMSLP is that great musicians like Raquel Samayoa find them easily, adapt them to sound best on their instrument, play them for pleasure, and record them for the pleasure of others.

A Cellist's Garden of Verses as performed by Sam's Cello Studio in Urbana

My friend Sam Araya helped his students put lovely readings of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems and beautiful artwork by young artists together with thoughtful, expressive, and heartfelt performances of these pieces by six of his students. You can also listen via YouTube.

Mozart K 310

The Mozart A minor Piano Sonata, K 310 is a wonder. I have loved listening to it on recordings, particularly Dinu Lipatti's 1950 recording, which I first "met" when I was twenty, and have listened to hundreds of times. It is the last piece in the first volume of the Henle edition. A crown on top of a case of jewels.

Instead of reading through it and admiring it from a purely aspirational state (wouldn't it be nice to be able to play this like a pianist would), I find myself practicing it. Through practicing it I find myself learning about how to play the piano. For me that means consciously connecting with all my fingers, not just the strong ones, and it also means paying attention to fingering. The notes don't play themselves, after all.

Paying attention in this way means moving beyond my usual game of "blind man's bluff," and onto a new "game" of seeing if I can play a given phrase comfortably all the way through, and trying to connect my two hands together through the piano.

I'm interested to see if I can replicate what I accomplished this morning later today.

Luck

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck.

This paragraph from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet threw me for a loop (or, maybe, took me aback).

I tend to think about luck favoring the prepared mind, or being simply a matter of circumstance, but never have I thought of an instance of good luck being able to trace itself back directly to an instance of bad luck.

I wonder if it works with success as well? Instances of success are almost always preceded by instances of failure, and sometimes you only need one instance of success to make a profound difference in your life, as in conceiving a child.

There are also instances of good luck that are not easily traceable to instances of bad luck like happening upon an old friend in an unlikely place, coming upon a particular combination of notes and rhythms that work in a piece, happening to turn on the radio or television at the right time to see or hear something, or finding an thought-provoking passage in a book to write a blogpost about.

Autonomy

I'm so happy to encounter Frances Wilson (who I know as the cross-eyed pianist) elsewhere in these internets! Her post about autonomy really resonates with me today.

Mozart on the Piano

A week or two ago I opened my neglected two-volume set of Mozart Piano Sonatas, and now I find that I have fallen into a new habit. Sure, we all know that Mozart was a great composer, but in some way it feels that when I am playing his piano music I am able to understand more about why he was a great composer.

I have absolutely no desire to play this music for anyone except myself, and I take all of the deviations from expectations dictated through what we have come to call the Viennese classical style as special gifts given to people who accept them as such.

Through my daily meetings with Mozart's musical mind I have come to learn more about music than I thought I did, particularly because playing the piano is and has always been a struggle for me. I never had the early "training" that allows the hands to, as one of my young violin students who also plays piano says, "know what they are doing," though the time I spent learning to play scales with both hands together in parallel motion when was in piano class at Juilliard (with Frances Goldstein) has stuck with me over the decades. Well, some of the scales.

Playing piano will always be a matter of translation for me, and I know that it will never feel like a musical mother tongue. I have also come to understand that it doesn't matter as long as I can derive personal pleasure out of playing, and can continue to grow as a musician.

But I have to confess. I sometimes have a physical urge to play. I often wake up in the morning with Mozart piano music in my head, and the deep desire to play and shape it with my hands. Playing the piano every day (and playing Mozart every day) seems to fill in gaps in my psyche and my spirit.

What a gift Mozart gave to us in his piano music.

UPDATE: While looking for Mozart posts and piano posts to tag on this blog, I came across this. If it's November it must be Mozart indeed!

All politics is no longer local

Tip O'Neill is known for having said, back in the later part of the twentieth century, "All politics is local." In the twenty-first century it now looks like all politics is now national.

If it's November, it's time to get out the Troika

And violists can have productive fun playing my transcription for three violas of "November" from Tchaikovsky's "The Seasons."

You can listen to a computer-generated recording here. I hope to have one made by three humans at some point in the future.

Shifting Autumn Colors

"Dancing on the Fingerboard" has four brief autumn-themed violin or viola pieces for learning and practicing shifting from the first position to the third position. The first is in the major mode, is played with separate bows, and is mezzo-forte throughout. I call it "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Green. The second piece has the same pitches and rhythms as the first, but it has dynamics and bowings. It is called "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Yellow.

The third piece, "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Orange," is in the minor mode, uses separate bows, and maintains the same dynamic level throughout. The fourth piece, "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Red," marked at a slower tempo than the first three, has the same pitches as "Orange," but it has dynamic markings and bowings.

While Michael and I went walking in the woods today (Fox Ridge and Lake Charleston), I took some video of the yellow leaves to pair with "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Yellow." Yesterday I took some video of red trees for "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Red."

Now I have two videos to share.

Happy Halloween from Georges Méliès et moi

Nothing says "Happy Halloween" quite like Georges Méliès's 1896 film "The Haunted Castle." I am so pleased that "High Shape-shifting Ghosts" from my latest solo viola opus, "Dancing on the Fingerboard," fits an excerpt from it rather well.

A photograph to go with my updated profile

This is an accidental photo that happened yesterday while I was trying to make a video recording (while I was practicing). I had no idea that when I pressed the wrong button my ipad was on the "portrait" setting. The photograph captures my Becker viola in all of its orange glory (something that I have come to love over time).

The picture to the right is a photograph of a collage that I made around thirty years ago, when I was trying to emulate Robert Motherwell. I think that the two images work together in a nice dance.

Robyn Sarah's music, late and soon

It is a luxury to read a memoir about music written by an excellent writer who happens to have spent the greater part of her life as a musician. There are musicians who can write well, but they often don't have the discipline (gained from experience) to write as clearly, cleanly, and lyrically as they would like to. That takes an additional lifetime of work, one that Robyn Sarah has managed to sandwich between her lives as a student musician and as an adult returning to serious study.

Robyn Sarah is a Canadian writer. She has won multiple awards for her poetry, has published collections of essays about poetry, published collections of short stories, and has served as a university professor and as an editor.

Sarah began her musical life in Montreal with piano lessons, and from the age of eleven to seventeen she had the great good fortune of studying with Philip Cohen, a teacher who intuitively understood Robyn's musical needs as well as her particuar method of thinking and learning. She briefly returned to lessons with Phil in early adulthood, but for logistical reasons didn't continue.

The memoir bounces back and forth in time, so I will freely do the same when writing about it (though with far less elegance).

Concurrent with her piano studies, Robyn begins playing clarinet in her school band. Energized by the musical life she finds playing with others, she becomes a good enough player to attend the Conservatory in Montreal, where she finds an excellent teacher, and plays well enough to be principal clarinetist in the orchestra. She falls deeply in love with music, but studies philosophy at the University. She also decides against a musical career path, and pursues a career as a writer.

Sarah only spends a few paragraphs in the memoir writing about her thirty-five-year life away from music. Her path back to music is unusually abrupt: she is asked to play clarinet at an event she is attending as a poet, and has very little time to get in any kind of playing shape. It is this event that gives her the idea to return to serious piano study, with the intention of preparing a recital for her sixtieth birthday, and writing about the proceess. A few years pass, and then she calls up her old teacher.

I love the first sentences of the memoir:

I WAS LATE FOR MY PIANO LESSON. THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATE.

During one of her lessons as a returning student, Phil Cohen matter-of-factly makes a comment about synesthesia that resonates with Robyn. Another comment about learning backwards makes her realize that backwards learning has played a great part in her life as a writer as well as her life as a musician.

After reading her descriptions of sensory experiences, I can relate to the "kind" of synesthesia her teacher noticed. My multi-sensory experiences do not correspond to the "normal" definitions of synesthesia. I certainly appreciate colors, but I do not equate them with numbers, letters, or pitches. My pitch memory, like Robyn's, is poor and fleeting, but, since returning to string playing in my thirties, and practicing deliberately for thirty years, I have built up a true kinetic association with what I hear, and what I want to hear. I find that I can physically realize the motion involved in an upcoming phrase of music while I am playing material that comes a few notes (or even measures) earlier. It is like being in two places at once: experiencing where I am, and knowing exactly where I am going.

I have always taught my students that musicians develop eyes that hear and ears that see, but I believe sensory swapping is far more complicated that that. There is probably an inborn component to color and number, letter, or pitch synesthesia, but I have found that other kinds of sensory swapping can be developed. Mine involves the senses of touch (in the present and the future), an inner sense of smell and even one of taste or flavor. When writing musical phrases I experience a sort of physicality of the mind, and it is natural for me to "hear" what it feels like to play a phrase on a given instrument. I think that this is the kind of sense integration that Phil Cohen was talking about when he mentioned synesthesia. I also think that the reason he taught Robyn Sarah the way he did is that he knew that she could intellectually and physically understand what he was teaching her.

The center (the core, the heart) of the memoir is the teaching personality of the sometimes enigmatic and always imaginative Phil Cohen. There are other teachers mentioned in the memoir. Some of them are formal teachers (including former students of Phil), some are friends who offer wisdom, and some have excellent pianos that she plays on (her childhood upright piano is the only instrument she owns). It is what Phil has to say about music and musical life that really resonates with me as both a practicing musician and as a teacher.

The title of the memoir might actually be a reflection on a "refrain" that Phil always comes back to.

Try to play in such a way as to put the future always in your hands.

The future creates the present. The future causes the present. Know where you're going--know where the music is going. Music is movement.

Robyn Sarah's young adventures with music present a 1960s Montreal rich with the latest in youth culture, where she and her circle of intellectual and musical friends were interested in harpsichord kits (she helped build a harpsichord), classical guitar, listening to the latest new discoveries in old music, and enjoying the best in 1960s pop music. With her return to piano study, we also get to see a twenty-first-century Montreal, where Robyn finds restaurants and other venues (including an adult care facility) with nice pianos to practice on. She spends a lot of her time going from one piano venue to the next, and gaining performance experience in exchange for dinner.

I wonder how many of the restaurant diners she played for might have read her work, and had no idea who it was playing Chopin for them.

We also get to spend two weeks with Robyn at an intensive piano camp, where she gets a taste of just how difficult is to maintain a love of music while, even though it is supposed to be a non-competitive experience, competing with pianists young enough to be her grandchildren.

I love this book because I am a discerning reader, a practicing musician, and a teacher. I also love it because I approach the creative work of writing music much like the way Robyn Sarah approaches her creative work as a poet. I recommend this book to anyone who participates in the "dance" of music as a student (particularly as an adult student), as a teacher, as an listener, or as a practicioner, professional or otherwise, who no longer has the luxury of studying with a teacher. And I would also recommend it to anyone who appreciates excellent writing, and to anyone interested in the mystery of the creative process. It is available from Biblioasis, amazon, and other places you buy books.

UPDATE: The book is now available as an audiobook (read by Robyn Sarah), and is available through this link.

Power

Back in the days when waterways were the means of travel for commerce, power went to those who controlled the coastlines. An Isthmus was a gateway from one large body of water to another, and that is why those landforms were the sites of the greatest powerful cities and empires of the ancient world. Then we (humans) added roads, which, in Europe, all led to Rome.

We had bridges and aqueducts, boats that delivered goods (and people, sometimes as property, in the case of slaves) across oceans. People bought and sold shares in the companies that did this (including Handel). Then we had railroads, which made huge amounts of money for the people that owned them and owned shares in the companies, car companies and travel by highway moved the monopoly of train travel elsewhere. The we had radio broadcasting, newspaper publishing, and television broadcasting as the center of power.

And with Facebook we have found our way to a “place” where the people who have the most power are the people who have managed to control the way people, who would normally be able to communicate just fine without a tool that makes communication almost effortless, dependent on the kind of communication that Facebook offers. 

It has made communication through its platforms the ONLY way that some people communicate with their neighbors about events in their own communities because the platform is so easy to use. People who don’t participate in Facebook often don’t know what is going on in their own community because the local press has dwindled to almost nothing. And in the case of my community and communities that are like mine in Illinois, newspapers are not even locally owned, and do not report much (if anything) about what is happening in a town if it doesn’t have something to do with commerce.

So, in a way, Facebook has, by controlling the flow of "culture," managed to make natural kinds of culture (the local kind) hard to participate in. And it can render invisible things and events that are not shiny, glowing, convenient, amusing, and instant. If it disappears we (as human beings) will find other ways of communicating. Maybe after the pandemic we will find more joy in interacting socially in ways that don’t involve a multi-billion-dollar company making money from our relationships.

I sure hope so.