Just because it's June

My friendship with the cellist Daniel Morganstern goes back to June of 1978, when one of his students was a summer roommate. We were, as he said, "an octave" apart. I was eighteen and he was thirty-six. He and his wife June acted like surrogate parents to me. I thought it was such amazing serendipity that my mother, also named June, had the same birthday: June 30th. June might have attributed it to a steller synchronicity, but the friendship between me, Danny, and June has lasted and deepened through the decades.

Shortly after Danny began his work as an editor with the International Music Company, I helped him by writing program notes and engraving scores into Finale. There are a few arrangements in his huge IMC catalog of editions and two-cello transcriptions of the cello repertoire that are mostly my work, and I am proud to say that this arrangement of Tchaikovsky's "June" from The Seasons, Opus 37a, is one of them.

You can order the music here.

Kreisler, Kroll, Banjo, Fiddle, and Hadelich

Perhaps this is just an excuse to share this wonderful (and new) performance by Augustin Hadelich of William Kroll's "Banjo and Fiddle," but I did happen to notice the similarity of the first motive of the Kroll to a motive in Fritz Kreisler's "Allegretto in the Style of Boccherini."

Here is Augustin Hadelich's performance of the Kroll:



And here is a recording of Fritz Kreisler playing his Allegretto:



The Kreisler, published in 1910, came first. The Kroll is from 1945. It is one of Kreisler's "in the style of pieces" that were actually original compositions, and it is unlikely that he found this catchy motive in a piece by Boccherini.

Angela Bofil

I just learned last night that Angela Bofil died last week. I knew that she had been wracked with health problems since her strokes in 2006 and 2007 because I have been following her career since the beginning. Why? Beause she was the first (and only) pop star that I could, at least for a weekend in 1978, call a friend.

A pianist friend of mine at Juilliard named Iris knew Angela from growing up in New York, and Iris had written a love song about her crush (and then, apparantly later boyfriend) Michael, a violinist at Juilliard. Iris wanted to have flute in the song, and I guess I was probably asked to do it because I was someone she considered friendly and open to improvisation. I was also planning to be around during the summer. The three of us drove to Long Island to Iris's family house, and we had a rather cozy and crazy "girls weekend," complete with astrological readings and a night walk in the boggy wilderness. Angie was doing a colonic cleanse accompanied by a strange diet in order to starve herself to be "pop-star thin." It was a real struggle for her to "look" the part of a pop star, regardless of her musical ability. I remember that she also made constant calls to her manager. We improvised a great deal, which was really fun. She was a tremendously gifted musician who had a remarkable voice. I also remember the first line of the song, which we never did end up recording.

Marion Bauer's Elegie: transcription and a shallow dive

I have been making my way through Marion Bauer's piano music, and came upon this lovely Elegie that was published in 1904, when Bauer was twenty-two. The Elegie and its companion piece "Arabesque" were her first published compositions. She dedicated Arabesque to her sister, Emilie Frances Bauer, who was her first teacher, and she dedicated the Elegie to her second teacher, Henry Holden Huss.

The title page indicates that the John Church Company was part of the Canadian Department of Agriculture, but I can't find any other references to that particular Canadian connection. The company was started in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1885 and incorporated in 1889 by John Church Jr. One of its subsidiaries was the Boston-based Everett Piano Company, and another was the Royal Manufacturing Company in Cincinnati which made more portable instruments: drums, violins, mandolins, guitars, and banjos.

By the late 1870s they were one of the largest publishers of sheet music in the United States. The company was acquired by Theodore Presser in 1930.

I immediately thought of transcribing it for violin and piano, and then noticed that with a few minor alterations it works really well on the flute. So here it is!

PDF files for the score and parts for both versions are available on this page of the IMSLP. You can listen to the violin version here, and the flute version here.

Marion Bauer Four Songs, Opus 16 set to poems of John Gould Fletcher

I am so grateful to learn about the American imagist poet John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) from the American composer Marion Bauer (1882-1955). The four songs published in 1924 as Opus 16 don’t seem to be available for purchase as a set but "Through the Upland Meadows," "Midsummer Dreams," and "In the Bosom of the Desert" are published as separate titles by Schirmer, which is now Wise Music (print on demand). For some reason Schirmer/Wise has not reissued "I Love the Night," the third song in the set. However the complete 1924 Schirmer edition is available at six university libraries and can be found through the worldcat. If you are a soprano looking for great music to sing in English that uses tonal language like that of Lili Boulanger and Gabriel Fauré (particularly his Verlaine songs), you should consider adding these Bauer songs to your repertoire.

Marion Bauer wrote this set of songs in 1922. "Through the Upland Meadows" is dedicated to the singer and early-music scholar Yves Tinayre, and "I Love the Night" is dedicated to the Canadian soprano Éva Gauthier, who premiered the song in Aeolian Hall on October 23, 1922. Lillian Gustafson gave the first performance of the entire set on March 21, 1925.

We know that Bauer was considering orchestrating this set of songs, because she developed a four-handed version of the piano part, which is something she did in preparation for orchestrating.

It is not known if she ever completed the orchestration. This set of of songs would make an excellent orchestration project for a composer familiar with Bauer's orchestral work who is in a position to gain permission to make and publish an orchestration. I don't believe that I am important enough a composer for Wise to consider engaging for such a project.

When I performed Marion Bauer's exquisite viola sonata back in 2012, there was very little information to be found about her life and work. Here is what I knew at the time (from a program):

The American composer Marion Bauer grew up in Walla-Walla, Washington, moved to New York in 1903, and then traveled to France where she exchanged English instruction for lessons in composition and analysis with Nadia Boulanger (Bauer was the first of Boulanger’s many American students). When Bauer returned to New York, she helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composer’s Alliance. She and Amy Beach were founding members of the Society of American Women Composers. Bauer taught composition, analysis, and music history at New York University from 1926-1951, and she taught at The Juilliard School from 1940-1955. She was a mentor and teacher to Ruth Crawford (Seeger), Aaron Copland, and Milton Babbitt. In addition to writing three books about music, Bauer wrote a great deal of chamber music, piano music, and vocal music, but only a small number of her many publications have been reissued, and her work as a composer was largely forgotten after her death.

Now we have an annotated list of her known works, and Mount Holyoke has collected and catalogued fifty of her manuscripts in their library. There are now also twenty-five of her pieces available in the IMSLP.

I have really enjoyed listening (again and again) to this set of four songs on a new recording called "New Moon" that will be released on June 20th by the Boston-based arts organization Calliope's Call. The Bauer songs are performed exquisitely by soprano Evangelia Leontis and pianist JJ Penna. Also on the recording are songs set to a reworking/translation of poems from the Persian poet Hafiz by the American composer Sarah Hutchings (sung by Leontis), "Valentines from Amherst," settings of Emily Dickenson's poetry, by the American composer Jodi Goble, and Libby Larsen's "Love after 1950" set to poems by Rita Dove, Julie Kane, Kathryn Daniels, Liz Lochhead, and Muriel Rukeyeser, performed beautifully and thoughtfully by Penna and mezzo-soprano Megan Roth.

The recording ends with a great unaccompanied two voice setting by Gilda Lyons of  "The Parting Glass," a traditional Scottish poem.

Now that I have enjoyed Bauer's setting of the four Fletcher poems, I want to read more of his work. I am looking forward to reading his books and collections of poems that are in the Internet Archive. 

I learned from an entry in the Poetry Foundation website that John Gould Fletcher was born in Arkansas in 1886, and his father, who had the same name, was a member of the confederate army. That family background might eventually have led him, after immersing himself in music, French Symbolism, and Asian art and philosophy, to be associated with a conservative group of poets called The Fugitives.

Fletcher started writing poetry while he was a student at Harvard, and after his father died in 1906, and he inherited the family fortune, he dropped out of Harvard. A few years later he left for Europe, and returned only after the outbreak of World War I.

If you follow the above link on the Poetry Foundation website you will find the rest of his fascinating biography, which involves friendships with Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and many other interesting people.

In 1938 Fletcher received the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems, and then his work fell into obscurity.

There are many creative people in various creative fields (music, art, literature) who have done work I admire with whom I do not share sympathetic feelings. I think that Fletcher might be one of them. He was an exact contemporary of Florence Price, who was born in Little Rock 1887 and lived there at the same time there as Fletcher did. Price also was in Boston studying at the New England Conservatory at around the same time Fletcher was a student at Harvard. (While he was at Harvard he spent much of his time visiting museums and going to concerts--maybe some were at the New England Conservatory.) 

Back in Little Rock Fletcher would have been in the some of the same physical spaces as Price (or at least walked the same streets), but Fletcher might not have seen someone like Florence Price as a person he would want to know because of her race. And I bet he would have admired her music, which he could have heard either in Little Rock or in Boston. I am, of course, eager to be proven wrong about this hunch. 

Consumerism, Artificial Intelligence, and Me

I remember having a lunchtime conversation with my Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Murray many years ago. My uncle, who is a mathematician, posed a (serious) question about why companies keep needing to make more and more money. I thought about this question for a long time, and it finally dawned on me that if you own a business and make just enough money to make your product and make a living from selling it, your business will fail because the amount you need to pay in materials, utilities, taxes, repairs, advertizing, insurance, and salaries will continue to rise. And the costs of being in business need to be worked into the cost of whatever it is you are selling, and that requires growing your business.  That, I guess, is the foundation of capitalism.

Value seems to be determined by what something can be sold for. In the case of physical art (or instruments) or antiques (or first edition books), the resale value seems to be determined on the state of a particularl market (or so the Antiques Roadshow tells me). Something made by someone who is no longer alive often ends up having more monetary value than it would have had while that person was living. Go figure.

And then there is "intellectual property," which is rarely intellectual, and never property in the physical sense of the word. And that "intellectual property" is often controlled by a person or company that holds the copyright, until it expires and goes into the public domain. When that happens it no longer has monetary value. The practical value (I'm talking about music and literature here) that it has after going into the public domain remains the same, but in our current climate it seems to have little value when it is made immediately available via the IMSLP, the Internet Archive, or the Gutenberg library, because (maybe) it is in the great "bin" of things that aren't worth selling. Images are different. Getty and Lebrecht (a member of Norman's family, maybe) obtained copyrights for all sorts of images, and they make a great deal of money selling their use.

Back in the earlier days of the Internet (not so long ago) YouTube videos used to offer music and other stuff that was instantly available. Now the things that people put on their YouTube channels are preceded by advertisements. The person who provided the "content" doesn't have a say about which advertisements come before their videos, and, unless they have a commercial account with YouTube, never see any kind of compensation from the entities that post the advertisements. Ads interrupt movies at random moments, and they interrupt pieces of music. The only way not to see the ads is to pay YouTube not to see them.

Back in the "before time" it used to be fun to see what might come up on the YouTube sidebar. Now it seems that the AI bots that keep track of my YouTube viewing and listening are getting more aggressive about what they want me to see. Perhaps they want me to see videos that have particuar ads, or videos that a YouTube user has paid to have made more visible.

Visibility on the Google-based internet used to be driven by popularity. Now it seems to be driven by a whole host of factors that I feel are way beyond my control.

I used to chuckle when I noticed that after buying something online my email, Facebook feed, and Instagram feed would be full of similar products.  I used to think that my feeds were personalized to my interests, but I now feel like my feeds are slowly driving my interests to a place I may not want to go. I admit that I have spent far too much time scrolling through entertaining videos on Intagram, but they have nothing to do with who I actually am (thank goodness) and what I actually need.

Facebook has been an effective way for me to share my work (which I offer mostly for free) with musicians who can use it. But now I have no idea who among my thousand or so Facebook friends sees what I post, or when. I might share this post on Facebook and see if anyone comments. Or not.

So I have been trying to spend more time away from the commercial parts of the internets, and spend more time with the things that really matter to me. It feels so great, for example, to have obtained enough piano technique to understand how great it feels to play Schumann on the piano.

As the world becomes more driven by the intelligence that is artificial, I feel less and less "connected." I also know that because of the "devaluation" of the blogosphere this post will only be read by people who know me or know my work. And that's fine. Actually, that is great.

Unlike "content creators" who need to generate enough "content" to remain visible and relevant, I am content (not a bad pun) to write what I want when I want (both music and prose), and have it be enjoyed for what it is by dozens--on or off line.

The germ of the musical Russian nineteenth century in two measures of Bach

I have noticed these two measures of marvelous chromatic movement every time I make my way through J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, but this time I decided to document it and share my delight. Here are measures thirteen and fourteen of the tenth fugue of the first book.

You can listen to it played at a very leisurely tempo here. I hope you hear what I hear (and what I imagine Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Glazunov heard as well).

And while I have your ear, make sure to check out this post concerning what Gershwin might have heard in the second prelude of the first book of the WTC.

Creature Feature

I just realized how many of my pieces seem to incorporate (or be) portraits of animals! There are multiple pieces about frogs, various lizards, crocodiles, butterflies, moths, snakes, birds, fish, turtles, squirrels, pangolins, and snails. I have also written pieces featuring a single cricket, a camel, a rabbit, a reindeer, a condor, a dog, a raccoon, an armadillo, a whale, and a musky rat-kangaroo.

And, of course, there are mythical creatures like a unicorn, a dragon, the bird phoenix, and a grelling (a Millhauser-imagined creature).

You can find 'em all here. (Don't forget to click on "older posts" at the bottom off the page).

More Musical Greetings from Cicada Illinois

When I learned that cicadas only travel fifteen meters (about sixteen yards) during their short lifespans, it occurred to me that the thirteen-year cicadas in our yard would have to be the offspring of the ones that emerged in 2011. I wrote a violin duet "about" them (back in 2011) as part of a set of four spring dances. After writing my piccolo and violin duet last week, I took out my violin duet and realized that it would work well for string quartet. So the "children" of 2011 get this portrait.

It is sad to think that cicadas don't have any kind of childhood. They do all their growing underground, and, unlike the deer that live in our yard, never get to meet their parents.

You can hear a computer-generated recording below. And to get the sense of the constant noise that the cicadas make, try it on repeat. I'm excited to play it with my quartet friends on Wednesday.

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

Joke of the Day

(You've never heard this one before, because I made it up last night.)

Prologue:

Before going to bed Michael and I usually watch "The Eleventh Hour" on MSNBC. And then Michael, needing an antidote to all the high-profile crime committed by people who shouldn't be in positions of authority in government, suggests changing to the Hallmark channel to see which "stars" are appearing on reruns of "Murder She Wrote."

I came up with this joke between MSNBC and "the stars" (half asleep, walking up the stairs heading for bed).

What do you call celebrities who get lifetime jail sentences?

Stars in stripes forever.

Remember, you heard it here first.

I can't think of any other time in history where the scenario of this joke could even be plausible.

Mad Hot Cicada Spring

Here's a little piece written from what feels and sounds like the physical epicenter of the double-brood emergence of 2024. We are a few days in, and each day seems to be louder than the last.

You can listen here, and find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

Polina Nikolaevna in Chekhov's "Three Years" modeled on Pauline Viardot?

In the story "Three Years," one of the characters sings a line from a song, "My friend, my tender friend." He sings it in reference to the character Polina Nikolaevna, who is a pianist. Of course I had to find out what the song was. To my surprise and delight it is the final line in "Nochju" by Pauline Viardot (set to a Puskin poem). You can find the transliterated text and an English translation here.

It suddenly dawned on me that the character of Polina Nikolaevna, an independent, hard working, brilliant, and decisive woman, who was anything but beautiful, who made her living by teaching piano lessons, might have been inspired by the very famous opera singer (and composer) who was connected by a long-term friendship and perhaps romance with Ivan Turgenev, a compatriot of Chekhov (and a writer who Chekhov certainly read, but may not have admired).

I haven't finished the story yet (Michael and I are reading it together as part of the Four Seasons Reading Club).

Finding Gaia, on this Mother's Day

I realized from an early age that my mother identified far more as a daughter than as a mother. My grandmother was a figure larger than life for all of my mother's life. I don't know if my mother had the chance to forgive her mother for the various injustices that my grandmother inflicted on her (possibly in the way of trying to be a good mother) after my grandmother was no longer alive. I like to think she might have.

I feel grateful that I have been able to identify, and by tangible means and actions, work my way through the various injustices (mostly neglect, perhaps to "spare me" from having a hovering mother) involved in my own childhood.

Through various measures of "self care" (mostly musical) I have even gotten to the point, little by little, of forgiving my mother for her human shortcomings.

To compensate for not having piano lessons as a kid (piano is an instrument that is riddled with inborn difficulties for me), I spend time every day at the piano teaching myself to play, as if I were my student. I put a lot of energy into identifying the right/left coordination problems that seem to be wired into my brain and fingers, and little by little I make little steps towards my goal of really being able to play the instrument. My progress is very slow, and with every little achievement I slay dragons.

In my family of origin talent was inborn. Nobody really worked at anything. My brothers were naturally gifted in many ways, and both my parents were naturally gifted to the extreme. I was not. I scraped by not having to work for anything until I reached the point when I realized that my "gifts" had expired. It happened around sixth grade.

At that point other people all seemed to be far better at the things I wanted to do, and I had no idea why.

After thinking that I had failed at playing the violin and could not return to it, my next desire was to sing, dance, and act. I went to a performing arts camp where I had drama and dance classes, but I never got picked for parts in plays and shows in school. I had no idea that you had to work at these things.

I actually never worked at anything until I started playing flute. I only started playing flute because I loved music, and because my mother could no longer play her flute. I felt that my only path forward was to take her place.

I was far behind my peers. I studied my peers, though, and in every case I noticed that their parents  (who I also studied) instilled a work ethic in them. I did not have any kind of work ethic instilled in me, so I had to instill it myself.

That self-generated work ethic sustained me. And it still sustains me. Perhaps what my mother taught me (without actually teaching me) was the value of being self sufficient. It sure made growing up difficult, but here we are.

Now I understand that my mother, who had to reinvent herself many times because of various physical disabilities, valued her ability to work and grow as a visual artist, even when her vision was failing.

So this mother's day I offer this painting by my mother in celebration of her love of painting and nature. And I humbly remember that we all do what we can as mothers and as children with the hope that each new generation will be an improvement on the last generation(s) if childhood was difficult, and an equal to the last generations if childhood was wonderful.

A conversation with Larry Schoenberg (about his father's music)

What an interesting conversation about Arnold Schoenberg's legacy and his family life. How interesting to hear about him as a father and as a human being!

Accessibility

I'm currently reading Eve by Cat Bohannon (a birthday present from Michael). I got the sudden urge, about 130 pages in, to write to Ms. Bohannon and tell her how much I am enjoying her book. So I found her email address and wrote her a short note. Then I went back to reading.

I have always enjoyed the opportunity to let living writers know when I have been particularly moved by a piece of their work. During the twentieth century, in the days before the internets, I would write letters to people through their publishers. But now a quick "connect" link on a webpage works very quickly.

I still do write to writers I admire through the postal system, if I can, and I love it when I get a written response.

I always enjoy it when musicians (particularly young musicians) who are playing something I wrote get in touch with me. Some people write to clarify an accidental, and some use clarifying an accidental as an excuse to write. I try to make everything that I write as free from ambiguity as possible, so the accidental question comes up less and less.

Still, this whole music thing is about communication, and I appreciate any communication that comes my way. It helps fill the void that comes with publication, which offers so much in the way of hope, but often results in having music sit on a publisher's shelves or on files on a publisher's hard drive.

I suppose it is different for books because there is a greater "audience" for books than there is, for example, for people who want to play twenty-first-century music for contrabassoon and piano.

Unfortunately there are composers that I cannot connect with. If I could write a letter to Haydn, I would thank him for the constant joy his music brings me. If I could write to Mozart I would tell him how much his piano music teaches me about playing the piano.

If I could write to Bach I would thank him for the solo violin and cello pieces he wrote, and assure him that I know that he hoped one day they would all be played on the viola, which was his bowed instrument of choice. There are also a few pitches in his music for keyboard that I would love to have him explain functionally to me.

I would write to Saint-Saëns to thank him for his violin music, his piano music, and his prose, and I would write to Hindemith and tell him that he has a true friend in the twenty-first century, and how he is a constant inspiration as a composer and as a writer about music. I would write to Beethoven, but I don't believe he would take me seriously. I don't think Brahms would either. I know Tchaikovsky wouldn't.