Oatmantaschen for Purim

I haven't posted a recipe for a while. This one is more of a sculpture, and also an excuse to make up a word. A bit of levity helps these days. You could use any oatmeal cookie recipe, but here's what I did (my personal alternation of the recipe on the lid of the Quaker Oats container):

Heat oven to 350. Blend half a stick of softened butter with one half cup brown sugar and one half cup of cane sugar. (I actually had to add a tablespoon of molasses because the brown sugar in the cabinet was too light for my taste.)

Add three eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and mix.

Combine 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and half a teaspoon salt with a cup and a half of flour (I used two parts whole Bob's Red Mill whole wheat graham flour and one part King Arthur white), and mix together to form a dough.

Then add a cup of raisins, and three cups of rolled oats.

This is just a normal oatmeal cookie recipe for me (lots of flavor and texture, without being too sweet). I made one sheet of normal ones, and while they were cooking I put about half a cup of raisins in a glass dish with a splash of vanilla and a splash of water. I cooked this mixture (covered) on high for about 30 seconds.

I formed some slightly larger cookies with the remaining dough, made a little thumbprint-sized well in each one, and put a little of the raisin/vanilla mixture in each of them.

I cooked these for ten minutes. I could have taken them out a minute sooner.

A Treat for Today from Augustin Hadelich, Orion Weiss, and Pablo de Sarasate

I am also fond of lonely islands

I wrote this piece in December, 2021 after reading Tove Jansson's The Summer Book.

Paul Cortese, who has made his career in Spain, studied with my father in the 1970s. What a treat it is to be able to share this recording with my father now!

The playing and sharing of this piece is a reminder to me that from each of our remote islands in time and in space we can still make meaningful musical relationships with one another, as well as with the mysteries and possibilities of the musical phrase.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP, and listen by way of YouTube if you want:

Music by Women Festival Concert 9 at Mississippi University for Women

Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning are playing two flute and piano pieces of mine on this program ("In light we see, in light we are seen," and "For Poulenc") which you (and I) can hear through this livestream at 5:00 Central Time today, or at a time that is convenient for you (or me) after the concert is over.

Women's History Month 2022

I remember reading that after Lili Boulanger died on March 15, 1918, Nadia Boulanger used stationery with a black border during every subsequent March to honor the memory of her sister. I wish I remember where I read it (I have scoured all the possible sources on my bookshelves), but when the month of March became a month dedicated to women's history (the process started in 1978, and Congress made it official in 1987), I always believed, in my music-centered way, that it was because of the memory of Lili by Nadia. It could just be coincidence, though.

My interest in learning about and performing music written by women began in the later 1980s (it didn't occur to me that I might try my hand at writing music myself for at least ten years). Every March, from the small university radio station where I worked, I would broadcast as much music written by women as I could find. During the rest of the year I wrote articles about women who wrote music for the Maud Powell Signature (which has since been renamed), and eventually my pianist friend John David and I would play concerts of music written by women presented every March by the Women's Studies Program at the university. We hope to play our next concert for the Women's Studies Program in March of 2023.

I had to work really hard over the decades to convince people (musicians and listeners) that it was indeed possible for a women to write music as well as a man. I had to work especially hard at it while I worked as a reviewer for the American Record Guide (where most readers thought of me as "Mr. Fine" because reviews were signed by last name only, and more than 95% of the reviewers were men).

I know, of course, that some men are better composers than some women are, and I know that some women are better composers than some men are. I also know that most composers (with rare exceptions) write music of varying quality. But contrary to a lot of the listeners and a lot of the critics I have encountered, all men are not better composers than all women.

We now know this to be true. We didn't always.

I wish I could be in many places on March 5th!

While I am busy rehearsing and playing this concert:

Kara Huber will be giving a performance of "Two Places in Illinois" (a set of two pieces I wrote for her) at the Paris Fine Art Center in Paris, Illinois.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, flutist Faith Wasson and Oboist Mary Robinson will be playing "Four Coliloquies for Flute and Oboe" in an on-line concert.

And on the same day violist Paul Cortese will release his recording of "I am also fond of lonely islands," a piece for solo viola that I wrote for him. You will be able to find it here. And this is the cover:

Beyond the Pale

Merriam-Webster defines the idiom "beyond the pale" as something offensive or unacceptable, but to people who have Eastern European Jewish ancestry, the Pale was an actual boundary: an area of the Russian Empire where Jewish people were allowed to live legally, though they couldn't own land, and were restricted in the ways that they could earn money.

I have been thinking about the Pale quite a bit these days, since my ancestors on both sides of my family of origin lived in the Pale, which included much of Ukraine and Moldova (which was Basserabia when my maternal great grandfather emigrated to America).

I was pleased to find a Wikipedia article about the history of the Pale. The Jewish Virtual Library has an excellent entry, which attempts to untangle the various "partitions" and explain the rules and laws. The YIVO encyclopedia offers some more information, and this exhibit (called "Beyond the Pale) in the Internet Archive explains more about the restrictions of daily life.

The history of Jewish life in the Pale is not pretty. It is no wonder to me that so many of the people who came to America from the "old country" didn't want to tell stories about where they came from. People of my parents' generation (i.e. people in their 90s) are only learning about this history now, and even the smartest of the lot (like my father) are boggled and confused by the laws and restrictions that their grandparents had to endure.

Kathryn Jo Kibbe and Maria Sier Viola and Piano Recital

My "La Grenouillère" Sonata begins the program.

Folk Music from Ukraine: The Polyphony Project

We are all thinking about our neighbors in Ukraine right now. Some of us never really knew exactly where it is, exactly how big it is, and how rich it is in history and culture. I found a huge anthology of folk music in the IMSLP earlier today and have been playing through the songs this evening. I also came across this fantastic project (The Polyphony Project) organized by group of people who have been collecting songs from (mostly older) people in the villages of Ukraine. They have a YouTube channel. This is where I have started, and where I will be listening. But I wanted to share this channel right away.

Queens for a Day: Viola Day in Queens with Adoration

My six-viola arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration" comes about three-quarters of the way into this multi-viola program.

I send down cool sounds

When I was in the seventh grade our English teacher (Mrs. Harrison) asked us to take a poem from our textbook and do something with it, like draw a picture or set it to music. I chose to set the poem in our book about music to music. I had my mother's old piccolo, an Adler that didn't really work well, and I wrote a little melody using the low register, the only register I knew, because the fingerings were like the recorder. My friend Deb did the reading of the poem over my piccolo playing, and I believe we made a recording on a cassette player. The poem as we knew it had been seriously shortened.

I woke up this morning with the melody in my head, and eventually found the poem and poet on line.

The poet is Carl Hines, and is still living (in Indianapolis). Here's the full poem, which I found here:

This is the portion that was in our book:

Yeah here am I am standing at the crest of a tallest hill with a trumpet in my hand & dark glasses on.

Bearded & bereted I proudly stand! but there are no eyes to see me. I send down cool sounds! but there are no ears to hear me.

Deb and I had no idea what "bereted" meant, or that it might have been a play on the word "berated," since the reference to a beret comes later in the poem. We were too young to understand, anyway.

The tune? I only remember the first line. I no longer own a piccolo, so a violin will have to do.

Here it is.

If Carl Hines happens by this post, I would like to say a big "thank you" for giving me the courage to respond to a poem (or portion thereof) musically.

The fruit of things unseen

Around the beginning of the pandemic, I planted a dried-up piece of ginger. I was surprised that it grew to be a nice plant, and even more suprised when it gave me a few tiny orchid-like flowers. Then, after more than two years, the leaves and stalks turned brown. Today, nearly three years (!!!) after planting, I dug up a root (which had some new shoots on it that I left in the pot). I ate a slice this morning, and made soup with some for lunch. It tasted incredible!

Today's harvest reminds me that are good things that come from nurturing what you cannot see, trusting that there will be a time that is right to dig them up, and intuitively responding to the feeling that the right time has arrived.

On another note (no pun intended, but I chuckled anyway), all the piano practicing I have been doing has started to give me rewards as well.

And during today's walk Michael and I had the feeling of being outdoors in spring (we were over-dressed).

Perhaps things are looking up.

Who is listening, and why they are there

When I was fourteen I heard the Opus 44 Dvorak Serenade for the first time. The concert was at Jordan Hall in Boston, and was performed by high school students. I remember how beautifully Kip Wilkins (who later became a conductor) played the first oboe part. It was a life-changing experience for me. I had never before heard anything instrumental that was so beautiful, so engaging, and so multi-textured.

Last night I heard a fine performance of the piece given by an ensemble made of university faculty, university students, and a non-university-affiliated freelancer. Just as the performance was about to begin I realized that the last time I had heard the piece in a live concert was when I was a teenager is Boston (when all concerts were live, unless you heard a radio broadcast of a live concert). I have, of course, heard it played on recordings, but for this piece, with all its variety of lower-octave textures (two bassoons, one contrabassoon, one cello, one bass, and a low third horn), recordings rarely do it justice. This one comes pretty close if you follow the score. In a concert a score for this piece isn't necessary because you can see who is playing what.



But I digress . . .

The point of this post is that when you are giving a performance the piece you happen to be playing could be a piece that has special significance in the past, present, or future life of someone in the audience. For me it was a tying together of the musical person I happened to be when I was fourteen with the musical person I happened to be almost half a century later.

This piece is so spectacularly written that as long as the musicians are up to the task at hand (and as long as you have an excellent first oboe and first horn, and first bassoon, and clarinetists who play well together) listening to a performance is a similar experience whether it happens to be in Boston, Downstate Illinois, or Prague, or in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century.

But I digress again . . .

I'm writing this post as a reminder to always remember that a concert is a special occasion for a whole host of reasons, very few of which the people performing know or will ever know.

Autumn Leaves recorded by Emanuel Vardi (viola) and Barbra Streisand in 1966

Michel Legrand was the conductor for the recording session, and Emanuel Vardi improvised the accompaniment at sight from just a chord chart. This was the first (and only) take.

Valentine's Day 2022

My mother died on Valentine's Day of 2016, and these are two of my favorite pieces of her art. They greet me every morning when I get out of bed, and I can see them out of the corner of my eye while I am working. My back is turned to them when I practice, so they look over my shoulder.

As I begin to grow farther away from my childhood and adolescence, with all of the things that could have gone better for me, or might have been made easier for me, I also have grown away from feeling that the struggles my parents faced, individually, as a couple, and as parents of three distinctly different children with different needs, have to be my struggles.

I am proud to have struggles of my own that don't involve my mother at all.

When my mother's name and my grandmother's name were read from the memorial book at services on Friday night, I felt nothing but warmth for both of them. I know that their relationship was fraught with difficulties, most of which I could never really understand, because my mother, as a mother of a daughter, put her parental energy into not replicating the difficult relationship she had with her mother.

And she succeeded.

And she put her love into her work, which is hanging in our house, and allows me to feel her love every day.