Music is a mystery for people who play it, write it, listen to it, and write about it. The only thing I can really do when I try to say something about music is assume.
I always thought of sforzando as an accent reinforced by a sudden loud dynamic. And every definition I can find in the internets seems to agree with that assumption. But lately (as in just the other day) I have started to think of the marking as having more to do with phrasing and phrase direction than dynamics or even accent.
I have been observing the behavior of the sforzando in Beethoven violin sonatas lately, and in Beethoven (where he indicates them as "sf" without the "z") they really seem to function as a kind of a springboard to help organize the music horizontally into phrases.
Here are a couple of indications of how they behave in their habitat (Beethoven Violin Sonata Opus 23):
Unfortunately I learned about the MET broadcast of this opera only today, but I was very happy to find this discussion that includes some really wonderful excerpts. I look forward to when I can see and hear the whole opera.
If you only have a little time, scroll about 54 minutes in, and listen to the duet that the character of Orpheus sings with his double (another Orpheus).
I used to struggle with reminding students about the placement of the first finger. "Low first finger" takes so much time to say, and for beginning students who are not sure about note names, saying "F natural" or "B flat" doesn't always register quickly enough to keep a musical line going.
But this little device I thought up a while ago and am sharing here for the first time works like a charm.
It is also very easy to write an "M" or a "Y" on a student's music to serve as a reminder. The one-syllable nature of these letters also makes it possible to provide an efficient verbal reminder while someone is playing. With one student I use a catchphrase: "Engage the dolphin, (i.e. use your intelligence) and apply the Y."
This opens the door, of course, to a discussion of the "why" of music, or the "why' of anything concerning the content of anything in a given piece of music, but that is the subject of another blog post.
In 1788, around the time he was writing his 39th Symphony, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the first two movements of his 15th Piano Sonata, and all of his 16th Piano Sonata. He completed the C major Sonata on June 28, 1788, and indicated in his thematic catalog that it was a piece for beginners.
I first encountered the piece when I was ten or eleven, playing violin in an orchestra (the "All City" orchestra) in Newton, Massachusetts. One of the pieces on the program that we played at the Newton Free Library was the middle movement of K545 in a hand-written arrangement for piano and string orchestra. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
Sometime earlier in 2021 I was asked to arrange the first movement of this piece for string trio to play for a wedding, and was then informed that the people getting married had changed their mind (not about getting married, but about having this piece played). By that time I had put in some significant work on the transcription, and had fallen in love (once again) with the piece, so I decided to expand my arrangement and make it for string orchestra or string quintet, and include all the movements. I was amazed at how beautifully it transcribed (it kind of transcribed itself--I just put the notes in the places they needed to go). The International Music Company will be publishing it sometime in the next year.
I have been spending a lot of time at the piano lately, and have been making my way through the Mozart Sonatas trying to think a little bit like a pianist rather than like a tourist-composer.
I was not surprised to witness the growing pianistic complexity in the progression from one sonata to the next, but I was surprised that when I started practicing K545, I was able to think in a very clear way about what my hands and fingers were doing (or should be doing). It was almost as if Mozart were giving me a lesson in piano playing. I don't know if his purpose was to use the smallest number of notes possible to get the maximum amount of musical substance, but he certainly succeeded. Indeed, aside from a handful of triads and a few repeated eighth-note thirds, the piece spends much of its time as a duet for two voices.
And its brevity is remarkable.
Could Mozart have written it as an exercise in a kind of minimalism--a "chaser" after the Sturm und Drang of the C minor Sonata, K457? Could his attempt at simplicity in the 15th Sonata (in F major) written six months earlier in January of 1788, not have been pianistically or formally pared-down enough to serve his purpose?
The music is "Hanukkah Latkes" for strings. The score and parts are on this page of the IMSLP. I also made a new two-voice vocal arrangement (the song is really too much of a tongue-twister to sing with just one person) to replace the single voice and piano version that I made in 2009.
To paraphrase one of our granddaughters, when altering a recipe for green bean casserole, I'm the composer, and I can do what I want.
While the updated vocal score is waiting in line at the IMSLP, you can find a PDF of the new version of the song here.
Bruce Lazarus lost his parents to AIDS in 1993 and 1994. He wrote this memorial piece in 1995, and this year he made a video with images (still and moving) that is really remarkable.
I played on the street for years before I even knew of the existence of the word "busking." It has been a while since I have busked (maybe forty years), but I can still fully appreciate this study done this year by Samuel Stäbler of the Netherlands and Kim Katharina Mierisch of the UK.
I started playing on the street in New York in 1977 (mostly flute duets with fellow Juilliard students). Our best spot was in Greenwich Village in front of a bookstore, where we were given permission to play. When we were no longer allowed to play in front of the bookstore, we moved to a spot in front of a bakery. Our best day was Sunday, and the best time of day was the afternoon. The music was always classical, and we were almost children (I used to play a lot with the equally seventeen-year-old Jeff Khaner). After playing for about two hours, we made about $25 each, mostly in quarters. I would use the money to buy groceries.
Other Juilliard students tried their hands at playing on the street. I remember seeing Nigel Kennedy and Thomas Demenga on Fifth Avenue one cloudy day, playing in an alcove in front of Tiffany's in the late afternoon. Nobody stopped to listen. They didn't do so well on the street, but both have done extremely well in professional musical life.
It was a more innocent time. As long as we had permission from store owners, we didn't need any kind of permit. Nobody thought about amplification, nobody thought about videos (they weren't "invented" yet), and we could only measure our success in the volume and value of the coins people threw into our cases. People took pictures, though. I'm sure that images of me playing flute and recorder are on many an ektachrome slide, taken by tourists on vacation, and having been loaded onto carousel players long ago, now sit in basements and attics, only to be unearthed by grandchildren and great grandchildren, who will wonder if they are worth saving.
The only remnant of that time I have is this pencil drawing done in Graz, Austria.
I wrote a post in 2006 about my street-playing (or busking) experiences, which you can read here.
“The human heart is like india-rubber, a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it. If ‘little more than nothing,’ will disturb it, ‘little less than all things will suffice' to break it. As in the outer members of our frame, there is a vital power inherent in itself, that strengthens it against external violence. Every blow that shakes it will serve to harden it against a future stroke; as constant labour thickens the skin of the hand, and strengthens its muscles instead of wasting them away: so that a day of arduous toil that might excoriate a lady’s palm, would make no sensible impression on that of a hardy ploughman.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck.
This paragraph from Gary Paulsen'sHatchet 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.
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.
I am active as a composer, a violist, a violinist, a recorder player, and as a teacher. I have been keeping this space in the blogosphere alive with assumptions about music (and assorted other things) since 2005.
