New York City Ballet Orchestra petition for fair wages

I normally don't share petitions here, but this one from NYC Local 802 that demands fair wages and benefits for the people who play night after night in the New York City Ballet Orchestra is really important. This article in Allegro, the magazine of Local 802, explains the situation:

We’re outraged to report that the musicians of the New York City Ballet Orchestra, whose contract expired August 31, are not being offered the wages and healthcare they deserve and are instead being asked to make financial concessions once again.

These musicians bring the magic of live music to the most celebrated dancers, night after night. They are cultural ambassadors who help make New York City the artistic capital of the world.

During the pandemic, ballet management didn’t pay its musicians for over a year, from June 2020 to September 2021. Then, management imposed a 15 percent wage cut on the orchestra, at the musicians’ most vulnerable moment. During this same time period, the NYC Ballet had an endowment that was worth $263 million.

The ballet’s fundraising efforts have been robust and ticket sales have now exceeded 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The ballet even received more than $10 million in government support during the pandemic. A fair proposal to musicians would cost only a fraction of the ballet’s operating budget. Yet ballet management refuses to be transparent with financial information to justify its insulting offer to musicians.

To put it bluntly: ballet orchestra musicians are already being paid 9.3 percent less than in 2019. With more than 15 percent inflation, their purchasing power is 23 percent less than in 2019. Musicians and their families have suffered tremendous hardship as a result of this double hit of staggering inflation and the substantial pay cut that management imposed.

We urge the ballet to do the right thing and offer a fair proposal to its musicians that makes up for the sacrifices they were forced to endure during the pandemic — as well as inflation. We’ll do everything in our power to assist the musicians in their fight for the dignity and respect they deserve.

(Don't forget to uncheck the box if you don't want to get follow-up email messages.)

Discipline and Intuition

I was struck by an idea that Alan Alda presented during one of his "Clear + Vivid" podcast interviews. He was talking with his guest about stand-up comedy, and his guest mentioned a very strict kind of form for improvisation that he learned back in the early days of stand-up comedy. It involved using a phrase suggested by the audience, and that phrase had to occur at a specific time in the improvisation.

Alda added the notion that when you need to use discipline to organize something it stimulates the part of the brain associated with intuition.

This struck many nerves for me, both as a practicing and performing musician and as a composer.

I find that when I record myself practicing something while paying attention mainly to musical flights of fancy (like dynamics, expression, vibrato, sound), it never sounds as musically interesting as it does when I focus mainly on rhythm, maintaining an efficient bow stroke, and concentrating on the physical aspects of the left hand.

When writing a piece of music or making an arrangement I always get my best ideas when I am forced to stay within certain guidelines. Sometimes those guidelines involve avoiding instrumental difficulty, and sometimes those guidelines involve an external organizing force like a piece of film or a particular time frame. Sometimes those guidelines involve making my way from one tonality to another, and sometimes they involve staying within a given form (sometimes of my own creation, and sometimes not).

Twelve-tone music may not be great to listen to (at least the twelve-tone music written by mere mortals), but it is really stimulating to write. All that structure releases a lot of whatever chemical is associated with intuition. But writing scale-based pieces, working out species counterpoint problems, and writing fugues seems to do the same thing for me.

Violist's Shirt Syndrome

Yesterday I repaired my favorite linen shirt. It had gone threadbare in the strangest places: figures 1 and 2 show the patches I put on the back part of the left shoulder (shown from the inside and from the outside of the shirt), and figures 3 and 4 show the patches I put under the right arm (again from the inside and from the outside of the shirt). I made my patches from material that I cut from the length of the shirt (which was really too long for me anyway).

Today, after I donned the shirt and saw myself practicing in the mirror, I finally figured out why these areas were worn so badly. The shoulder is where my viola sits, and the stress under the right arm is from the motion of bowing, which pulls ever so slightly at the fabric, but does so constantly.

Monteverdi's Zefiro

One of the first recordings I pilfered from the tiny collection (maybe twenty) of records that my parents had was Noah Greenberg's 1954 recording of vocal music of Monteverdi with the New York Pro Musica. I was fourteen, and had just gotten a record player for my room (a KLH reconditioned from summer use in the Tanglewood music library--maybe a model 19 because it had a 16 r.p.m. speed). It was, as I recall, the first year that we had a working record player in the house (my father got one too--his was an AR). My love affair with Monteverdi has been going strong for half a century. "Zefiro" was the first piece on that record.

Ten years ago I posted a video of a wonderful performance of this piece by L'arpeggiata Ensemble, and this week I made an arrangement of it for strings.

[August 28, 2023]

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

Nobody in the orchestra is looking at Lennie!

I guess that he is doing his "thing" for the people singing in the chorus, but I find it amusing that nobody in the orchestra is looking at Leonard Bernstein. The presence of two harps and the two female soloists tells me that this is Mahler's Second Symphony, the sky and the white orchestral attire tell me that this was a Sunday afternoon concert at Tanglewood, and a quick search of the Boston Symphony Archives tells me that the year was 1970. I can name every one of the musicians playing, even from behind.

Oy! I have been AI'd

I just found out that some non-living entity created a profile of me that has nothing to do with reality. I'm not putting the link here, because I don't want it to register any page views. But I can't resist sharing the fact that in its most generic spewing of gobbledygook this "entity" didn't get anywhere remotely close to whatever it is that I do or have done. And the pieces this bot randomly picked up off the beaches of the internets that it claims are my "notable works" are not the names of pieces that I have written.

Alla Nazimova

I just finished writing music for Salomé's dance in Alla Nazimova's 1922 or 1923 silent movie Salome that is based on Oscar Wilde's 1891 play. My setting of the dance is for a collaborative project that will be finished in March, so I can't share my work now, but I will share it here eventually.

As is my custom, I tend to jump feet first into a project like this, going for the emotional substance of the film without doing any research. So now, unable to really let go of the music (which still runs through my head), I'm learning something about Alla Nazimova, who made the film (she was the producer and co-director as well as the star).

Fortunately there is an Alla Nazimova Society website that is full of information about her.

I love the article I found there concerning one of the wigs she wore in the film.

Nazimova seems to be an inspiration for Norma Desmond's character in Sunset Boulevard (made by Billy Wilder in 1950) since Desmond refers to portraying Salomé on film (you can watch that clip here). I don't think that Theda Bara's portrayal would have come to mind since her 1918 film was lost (except for a two-minute highlight reel that only came to light recently).

Alla Nazimova was born in Yalta (in Crimea) in 1879 as Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon, and died in 1945 in Los Angeles. Once billed as the world's greatest actress, she is also (posthumously) considered the "founding mother of Sapphic Hollywood." She was also a violinist.

Alla's father hid the fact that the family was Jewish, and would not let his daughter perform as a violinist under her family name (her father was a merchant, and having his daughter perform as a musician would damage his reputation), so she took the performing name of Nazimova after a character in a popular novel (Children of the Streets). She went to Moscow when she was seventeen to study acting with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was associated with Konstantin Stanislavski.

Nazimova left Russia for New York in 1905, met an agent, and became a star on Broadway (and a customer of Caswell-Massey, which has a beautiful tribute to her). She made her first silent film in 1916, and then headed off to Los Angeles to make more.

Salomé is extremely rich in visual and dramatic content. The (slightly edited from the original) dance section that I set starts about forty-one minutes in, and lasts for about ten minutes. I find (for obvious reasons) the music that goes with the version of the film that I linked to above distracting, so I prefer watching it with the sound turned off. Maybe some day I will set the whole film.

The Wikipedia article about the film mentions that it was the last film that Nazimova produced, and may have been the first "art" film made in the United States. It was not associated with any studio and was considered a failure at the time. The benefit of that kind of "failure" means that it can have a life as one of the treasures that remain in the public domain. You might enjoy following the links in the Wikipedia entry to learn about the film's cast (I certainly did).

Unlike Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Nazimova had a vibrant career in sound films and in the theater after her life as a silent film actress and producer.

Orchestral Island

The experience of a single-day orchestral concert with a rehearsal in the morning and a performance at night is, for me, kind of like being on an orchestral island. It is like an island in time, and can be a remarkable experience, particularly when it involves music that is both great and challenging to play well.

This past Saturday I had the chance to play a concerto concert that was part of a piano festival at the University of Illinois. The orchestra was full of friends, some I hadn't seen for many months, and some I hadn't seen for a year, and the music we played (the first movements of the Mozart Piano Concerto #17, the Schumann Piano Concerto, the first Rachmaninoff Concerto, and all of the Gershwin Concerto) was terrific. Three of the soloists were students at the festival, and the pianist who played the Gershwin was on the festival faculty.

My "normal" orchestral playing mindset (when there are rehearsals over a number of days) is to have the music running in my head in the "background" while I am doing other things, and in the "foreground" when I am practicing for the concert. It often runs through my head when I am trying to sleep. But after the concert is over there is kind of a "dump" that happens, and other things take over, like music I am writing, or non-concert music that I am practicing.

But in this case I haven't had the chance for the music to run its course in my mind (partially because for three of the pieces we only played the first movements), so I have an extended medley of the exposition of the Mozart followed by various passages from the opening, middle, and ending of the Schumann, the hard enharmonic passages and nice viola melodies from the Rachmaninoff, and one exciting passage after another from the Gershwin.

It is nearly midnight, and I'm writing this post now so that when it is finished I can stop thinking about both the music from the concert and about writing a post about it.

So here we are.

But the experience on Orchestral Island also involves the tremendous kind of interpersonal communication that goes on when forty or fifty musicians spend their rehearsal time in fully-focused concentration. The like-mindedness and connection that happens during the four or five hours of playing together is like nothing else in the world. And when you mix in really great soloists, and a conductor who really understands the music and is capable of communicating that understanding, it is really difficult to return to the "normal" life of a solitary musician.

Maybe that is why the music keeps running through my head. It was such a positive experience for me that in spite of the mental and physical stress connected with learning my part quickly, and the really hard work and concentration that is involved with playing a concerto program on such a small amount of rehearsal time, I really didn't want it to end.

But now this blog post has come to an end. Maybe I'll be able to get some sleep.

The Forest Near Ingolstadt for Soprano, Cello, and Piano

The text of this piece is adapted from chapter eleven of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the only passage in the novel that I find appropriate for a musical setting.

It takes place in the moment that the monster becomes aware of his senses. He experiences pleasure when seeing the moon, and can contrast that pleasure with his feelings of hunger and thirst. He notices that over time day turns into night and back into day. He also notices the sounds of birds. He tries to imitate them, but can't.

[March 11, 2023]

The music and a computer-generated recording are available on this page of the IMSLP. You can also listen here. The piece is in three movements, and lasts around thirteen minutes.

The New Grown-Ups Treehopper

Our son Ben Leddy and his Boston-based band have just released a recording, and I think it is fantastic. Make sure to listen to "Goodbye," which Ben wrote when he was a teenager, and sings with the perspective of an adult (and with such a beautiful voice). The instrumental playing is really remarkable too. All of it.

I'm so proud to be the mother of one of the New Grown-Ups.

Meditation on the best-known musical Méditation

I think that the best known musical meditation is the one from Jules Massenet's 1894 Opera Thaïs. The action that accompanies this piece happens offstage, when Thäis leaves her life as a pleasure-seeking courtesan, and enters religious life. After the Méditation, the monk Athanaël, who had persuaded Thäis to convert, realizes that he is in love with her.

The Méditation is set for solo violin, two harps, winds, and a chorus of closed-mouth singers. For my transcription for viola and piano I transposed the piece into G major (a fifth lower), and rewrote the piano part to better reflect the colors, pitches, and motion of the original score.

Martin Pierre Marsik's piano reduction of the Méditation was published by Heugel in 1894, and I imagine it was approved by Massenet. But Marsik's piano reduction doesn't sound very good transposed a fifth lower, and a need for a setting of the piece for viola and piano wasn't on anybody's radar during Massenet's lifetime.

Just for a lark, after making my viola and piano edition, I made a personal copy transposed back into the original key, and when I played it on the violin with a pianist friend, it felt better to play with than the Marsik piano reduction. But I guess I am a bit biased.

My edition is now available from the International Music Company (and will be among the new issues on this page soon), and I am very grateful that they respected my choice to rewrite the piano part.

Campagnoli

In the ten years since I wrote a post about Bartolomeo Campagnoli's Opus 22 Caprices for Viola and their relationship to the solo violin music of Johann Sebastian Bach, more of Campagnoli's work has been uploaded to the IMSLP. I was thrilled to find his five-volume Opus 21 Violin Method, which has, to my surprise and delight, violin versions of a handful of his viola caprices in the more advanced volumes.

Dedicated to the Duke of Cambridge, this lavish book has 132 progressive duets, and 118 solo violin etudes.

I like the above engraving of Campagnoli so much more than this wigged portrait:

While playing through the viola caprices this week (informed with my new knowledge about the differences between my bow arm when playing the violin and the viola), I observed that these caprices are not pieces to teach students how to play the viola. They are pieces written for violinists with advanced technique to help them learn what they have to do in order to play the viola well.

I'm excited about exploring all of the Campagnoli in the IMSLP:

Most interesting to me is the piece L'Illusion de la viole d'amour, Op.16 that is under the "compositions" tab. Unfortunately there is only one of the two parts available there. Maybe in another ten years the other part will come to light.

Long Tones and Summer Band Camp

It is band camp season in my university town. Summer after summer we hear hours of long tones played in unison on the fields adjacent to our neighborhood. And the percussionists work with an ultra-loud metronome.

I wonder if the improvement that band camp students experience in their playing during the week of camp is because of sustained (ha! what a pun) long tone practice.

During the school year, when a band rehearsal might last for a fifty-minute-long class period, there is simply not enough time for an extensive and leisurely long tone warm-up. At camp it becomes a community meditation, where you can turn off your brain, open up your breathing mechanism, and open your ears.

I imagine that during the school year most middle school and high school band students don't spend a hour of their after-school time practicing long tones, particularly when they have scales and etudes to practice and pieces to learn.

DIY Roku Streaming Stick Extender Supporter

We have a "dumb" TV, and all access to the world via said "dumb" TV comes to us through a fiber optic network.

We use a Roku stick and an extender (which I believe we got for free), because the plain stick gets very hot very quickly when connected.

The problem with the stick and the extender is that things get heavy on the back end, and instead of providing an aesthetically preferable right angle, we have at least the look of instability distracting us from our viewing experiences.

My solution? Three black hair ties and one Command brand adhesive hook.

Of plumb bobs and bow arms

I believe that my violin playing has improved significantly since my attention to my right arm while practicing has been "in the toilet."

[See this post for reference]

But upon returning to serious viola practice (my mother, or perhaps father tongue), I noticed that keeping the bow stick lower than the arm simply doesn't work if I want to make the sound that is in my ear. With my eyes glued to the mirror, I notice that the bow stick feels and sounds best when I have it either at an equal level to my arm, or in some cases a little bit higher. Instead of feeling that my right hand is like a weightless ball floating in a toilet tank, it feels (staying with plumbing water metaphors) more like there is a gently weighted plumb bob hanging somewhere between my forearm and my elbow, and my hand, while not being tense, responds slightly to that weight.

Except for the fact that moving around on a smaller instrument is easier, my left hand feels pretty much the same on both the violin and the viola (I have large hands for my height, broad fingers, and a square palm). I have always known that I had to do things differently with the right hand in order to sound natural on the violin, but until yesterday I never knew exactly what.

Practicing the Campagnoli Opus 22 Caprices with a viola-specific (perhaps my viola-specific) stick-to-arm relationship provides mind-expanding bow-arm-height awareness.

[N.B. The violist Paul Silverthorne gently pointed out to me that plumb bobs are not used in plumbing, although both come from plumbum which is Latin for lead.]