Podcast

[Thanks to Michael for the title.}

Harris Walz III "The Great Debate"

This is a celebration of Kamala Harris's debate performance last week (it's hard to believe that the presidential debate was just one week ago).

You will be able to find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP soon.

Morning Thoughts about Beethoven

I have to say that I am enjoying my 66th year, particularly since I am learning so much more about life and about music than ever before.

I have been working on my piano skills for a while (if you call a while a couple of decades), but now that I can play well enough to actually listen to what I am playing, I find myself totally boggled by the genius of Beethoven, my current companion at the piano.

How is it that I missed so much when I was younger when I listened to recordings and performances of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas? How is it that I never noticed just how personally and effectively he writes for the piano. And how different it is from the way he writes for the violin, the viola, the cello, or stringed instruments in combination.

Beethoven's piano writing contains multitudes, and I am only beginning to be able to notice the surface. His Sonatas are little (or not so little) worlds that are designed to be inhabited and animated by a single human being. The geography is there, the roads are all mapped out and paved, the climate is set, and the progression through the day is layed out. But the drama that happens is a personal one that resides in the mind, heart, and musical experience of the pianist. And that drama can change, depending on the particular feelings and experiences of the person playing.

And if someone is listening, the listener's personal experience can illuminate a secondary drama. I like to believe that in a performing situation the inner images of a person listening can have a great impact on the inner images of a person playing. When there are more people playing or more people listening it is different.

I am actually glad that I have come to this understanding of Beethoven later in my life (and at an age he never reached) because otherwise I would have been too intimidated by what he can do with a given musical idiom, gesture, motive, melodic fragment, harmonic progression to ever consider writing music myself. That what I write and have written is inferior to Beethoven is a given, but how inferior astonishes me on a daily basis.

I understand a lot more about Brahms now, because I understand a lot more of what Brahms understood about Beethoven. I am forever grateful that Brahms took up the job of trying with all his might to keep the figurative fire lit, because of the tremendous music he wrote. And Schubert was able to speak directly to pianists with far more ability than I ever imagine I will have (I do have a volume of Schubert Sonatas, just in case).

Beethoven certainly wrote music for pure entertainment. I would put the overtures and many of the symphonies in this category. And there's nothing wrong with writing and using music for entertainment. Mozart did it extremely well. Haydn too. And Schubert. But I'm so fortunate to have lived long enough to be able to recognize expression that is personal, and intended for pianists to connect with the essence of music.

When music written long ago with great care reaches out from the page and resonates with the beating of my heart, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude.

Zero Gravity, Many Tears

When I first saw this image I wondered how it was even possible for a person to play violin in zero gravity. How do you keep the bow on the string?

But Sarah Gillis, armed with a specially-made violin, did. And the John Williams piece from Star Wars: The Force Awakens she played remotely (oh so remotely) with El Sistema students in Venezuala, the United States, Brazil, Sweden, Uganda, and Haiti brought real tears to my eyes in this linked performance recorded the other day and broadcast yesterday.

To Dorico's credit . . .

Slowly I am making my way through the various help screens in the Dorico "manual," and though it takes what seems like eons to figure out what commonplace things (like text boxes) are called, I am finding out a little about the logic of the program.

But to their credit, the engraved musical examples they show are often by composers who are female. So far I have encountered Josephine Lang and Dora Pejačević.

I have also learned that the obtuse nature of the program is a result of the developers, who were "let go" by Sibelius, having to create a program from scratch with names for items and names procedures that would not be identified as proprietary to Sibelius (or to Finale, for that matter).

So I will continue to figure out how to do things Doricolly.

Cumberland Gap: a lot of joy in the morning

And that is our son Ben singing and playing mandolin.

Rockabye

Michael and I have been enjoying watching films starring Constance Bennett over the past week or so. We were introduced to her through a featured collection of pre-code movies on the Criterion channel called "Rebels at the Typewriter," where the lead female characters are strong-minded, and the screenwriters were all female.

Last night we watched Rockabye, a movie from 1932 where Bennett plays Judy, an actress who came to be a great success as a result of her manager discovering her in one of the seedier parts of town.

I give no spoilers about the plot here.

What struck me about the character of Judy is that she seems to be an amalgam of four famous female opera characters who made unfortunate choices in the course of their operas: Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Juilette in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, Carmen, in Bizet's Carmen, and Floria Tosca in Puccini's Tosca.

At a central point of the film, Judy returns to one of the speakeasys she frequented (and sang songs in) before she was a famous Broadway star. A patron played by Sterling Holloway asks her repeatedly to sing the 1916 Raymond Hubbel/John L. Golden song "Poor Butterfly." Here's the text, which is a reflection on the story of Madama Butterfly.

There's a story told of a little Japaneses
Sitting demurely 'neath the cherry blossom trees.
Miss Butterfly her name.
A sweet little innocend child was she,
Till a fine young American from the sea.
To her garden came.
Then met 'neath the cherry blossoms ev'ry day
And he taught her how to love in the "merican way,
To love with her soul! 'twas easy to learn;
Then he sailed away with a promise to return.

REFRAIN:

Poor Butterfly! 'neat the blossoms waiting
Poor Butterfly! For she loved him so.
The moment pass into hours
The hours pass into years
And as she smiles through her tears,
She murmurs low,
The moon and I know that he be faithful,
I'm sure he come to me bye and bye.
But if he don't come back
Then I never sigh or cry
I just mus' die.

"Won't you tell my love" she would whisper to the breeze
Tell him I'm waiting 'neath the cherry blossom trees.
My Sailor man to see.
The bees and the humming birds say they guess,
Ev'ry day that passes makes one day less.
'Till you'll come home to me.
For once Butterfly she gives her heart away,
She can never love again
She is his for aye.
Through all of this world,
For Ages to come,
So her face just smiles,
Tho' her heart is growing numb.

(REFRAIN)

Judy doesn't sing "Poor Butterfly," but she does sing Harry von Tilzer's "Till the Right Man Comes Along." Perhaps "Poor Butterfly" would make the connection too heavy-handed, or maybe it was too long for the film. But to anyone who knows the Puccini opera and the 1916 song, the purpose of mentioning the song in the film is very clear.

The way Judy is received in the speakeasy reminds me of the beginning of the second act of Carmen. And her brilliant, vulnerable, devoted, and fragile personality, along with her fame as an actress, reminds me of the character of Floria Tosca (who was based loosley on the actress Sarah Burnhardt) in the opera Tosca. And at one point in the film Judy quotes a few of Juliet's lines from Romeo and Juilet, bringing Juilet's fate to mind. Like all of the above-mentioned opera characters, Judy has difficult choices to make. I will leave it at that (I promosed no spoilers).

The movie isn't on YouTube, but I did find a clip of the speakeasy scene there:



And here's Frank Sinata singing "Poor Butterfly."

Hello again, Finale!

To celebrate the pleasure I had today working with Finale 27 (the finale Finale, and the companion/tool I prefer to keep/use when writing music), I made a new audio recording of my Tuba Sonata using the tuba sound that lives in the program. And then I made a video that incorporates passages from Alice in Orchestralia, I book I loved as a child. Instead of falling into a rabbit hole, Alice falls into a tuba.

You can read the book via this entry in archive.org.

And you can find the music here.

Finale's Finale

I was shocked to hear yesterday's news that Make Music, the "owner" of Finale, an engraving program I have been using for the past twenty-four years, is no longer supporting Finale. I understand the difficulty the company has had trying to keep up with various operating systems, and decided to take the plunge and learn to use Dorico (as the people at Finale suggested). I have known about Dorico for years, and people who use it consider it to be a superior program. Finale users were given a deeply discounted price, so I bought Dorico shortly after reading the news.

The "learning curve" is steep. There are these things called "flows" that I do not understand. They have nothing to do with my needs, so I hope to ignore them. I have tried to customize the way the program looks so that I can feel better about using it while I am using it.

Today I decided to import a piece from Finale so that I could check out the instrumental sounds in the program. My Tuba Sonata was fresh in my mind because I haven't been terribly happy with all the balances on the mp3 recording that I generated from my Finale files twelve years ago. I was able to import MXL files for all four movements quickly, but once I opened them in Dorico the playback was inconsistent. The piano part would randomly become absent from the audio playback (though it would be visible in the little blocks of color that appear in the playback window). When I could hear the piano it was either too loud or too soft. It happened with some movements, but not with others.

I could probably learn how to fix those problems eventually, but I found that the Dorico tuba "sound" to be terribly mechanical and lacking in dynamic flexibility. It was not at all like an approximation of a real tuba made from sound samples generated by real tuba players. And the piano was tinny and unexpressive.

I have come to kind of like the pianist that lives in my Finale program, and I can manipulate her to do just about anything I want. I have no clue how to manipulate the one in Dorico.

The documentation that is on the Dorico website gives diagrams of windows having to do with playback choices that don't coordinate with what I see in the program I downloaded yesterday.

Dynamics, as most musicians know, vary from instrument to instrument and register to register. When a tuba player reads a fortissimo it is a great deal louder than when a pianist reads it. A cello playing loud in the high register is far more piercing than a viola playing loud in the same register. The more I learn about music and about how instruments behave in their natural habitats, the less I trust computer-generated balances. Even in Finale I need to make sample mp3 files from adjusted duplicate notation files in order to counteract Finale's tendency to automatically play a second statement of musical material at a softer dynamic (one of my peeves about Finale).

I will continue to figure out how to manipulate physical aspects of scores in Dorico because I have the program. There seems to be a way to do most everything I need/want to notate, though the path is often clumsy and often involves scrolling down to the bottom of a menu or using paths that seem clumsy.

I believe that this program is not one designed for composers because the process of adding layers seems so very hit and miss, and while editing to get rid of wrong notes it is all too easy to get rid of right ones.

I guess that if you have the music already written on paper in its final form it would be much easier to figure out how many layers you need in each hand of a piano score, and once you get the hang of how to get from one layer to the next, input the layers as you need them. I still have far to go with this experience.

My way of coping is to do more writing on paper, and to keep using Finale 27 on my current laptop computer with its old Ventura operating system. Finale 27 will not work on the upcoming macOS 15 Sequoia operating system, so when I get a new computer, which will have Sequoia built in, I will put Dorico on it but leave Finale on my laptop, where I can use it until either my laptop or I can no longer function.

Remembering my brother Marshall

My brother Marshall Fine died ten years ago today, and in his honor I thought I'd share an impromptu video we made in 2013 (the last time I saw him) reading a Stamitz duet. It was the first time we ever played a viola duet together (we are sightreading). Michael took the video.



You can read all my posts about Marshall here.

Harris Walz II "Conventional"

You can find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

Hat Hack

It was a day that was both windy and sunny. I really wanted to wear my straw hat, but feared that it would fly off in the breeze.

So I opened a drawer in my desk and found an old shoelace (I always save them if they are in good shape). I fastened it to the little loop on the inside of the hat band, and look what happened!

When it is windy I can tie the shoelace under my chin, and if it isn't windy I can tuck the ties inside the hat.

Notice the bonus use of the shoelace to tie the hat around my waist if I don't want to wear it. Needless to say the other shoelace is now attached to another hat, and both hats can hang nicely on a single hook.

Why have I never thought of this before?

Now: A Retrospective

This is a contradiction in terms, to be sure, but there is no way to talk about "now" unless we do so in retrospect.

I was thinking the other day, while in the bathtub, where my sense of "now" is most active (particularly the moment when I submerge my shoulders and neck), that what we are doing as musicians is making it possible to anticipate, experience, and reflect on material that is happening at a time that we can call "now." We can put everything in place to experience that "now" (or, as composers, allow other people to experience it) by replicating the instrumentation, the horizontal and vertical configuration of pitches, and the dynamics and the textures of the pitches involved.

Yesterday during a consort rehearsal my three friends and I were able to repeat a particular "now" in a piece of Phinot we were playing--a subtle change of mode over three measures that sounded like an opening and closing of a window to the early twentieth century. We did it several times. It was so satisfying.

Phinot, who wrote the piece "then," made that particular "now" possible.

If I were skilled in philosophy I could explain it much better.

When we play a piece of music written by somebody who is no longer alive, we make a musical "now" possible. I'm not talking about authenticity, since there is really no such thing as musical authenticity (unless we are talking about physical objects like instruments or manuscripts). Any performance given at any time is going to be informed by the vast musical experience and vast personal experience of anyone playing or singing, and any performance or reading is going to be different.

I like to think of the huge number of people over time who have shared a thousand musical "nows" with me as I go about my musical life. It is a kind of a community.

I have been obsessed with the idea of "now" on and off for what seems like an eternity. And I tried to depict the idea in musical terms in an opera I wrote based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen."

I wrote a blogpost about the segment of the opera that concerns the idea of eternity as a "now" back in 2009. Here's a bit from that post:

I have used minimalism, but only in context and for specific purposes. In the case of this moment in my Snow Queen opera, Gerda, while en route to find her friend Kay, is stuck for what might be eternity in a magic garden. The concept of eternity looms large in the opera, and the above excerpt happens in the opera's temporal center. The text comes from a passage in Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart, which was published in 1883.

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.

The idea here is to make a minute and forty-four seconds seem like a huge amount of time: to mark the moment of now in music that, by its very nature, consists of a series of events that take place over time. This is, of course, distinctly different from the real (or imaginary) moment of actual "now."

Some day I will hear it performed. Here's a computer-generated recording of it as a stand-alone piece for soprano and string quartet, and a link to a PDF.

And I just found out that the thesis I wrote for my master's degree (a full analysis of the opera) is available online here.

Harris Walz now for Trumpet and Piano

I have been writing a series of obbligato parts to accompany the piano original.

My friend Daniel Gianola-Norris and his pianist friend Yvonne Wormer recorded this configuration of "Harris Walz" yesterday afternoon.



The trumpet and piano arrangement is now on this page of the IMSLP.

Leaping Past Zinnias

Elizabeth Tingley is a remarkable writer. I am very familiar with many of places she writes about in the book since I live in the Illinois town where she grew up. I also know many of the neighborhoods and locations she describes in New York and in the Boston area. I am in the rare position to report that she describes these places exactly as they are (or were in the later 20th century).

The madness and murder in the title concerns her brother-in-law Michael Laudor, who killed his pregnant girlfriend in 1998 during a psychotic episode, which was covered (after it happened) by the tabloid press.

Tingley's story is extremely honest, and devoid of sensationalism. It is an intimate portrait of the Laudor family, and a beautifully written account of how her experience with them intersects with her particular daemons (which she is able to work through methodically in the course of her life). It is a beautifully told story of survival--a book I really didn't want to put down.

While looking at reviews of other books and articles about Michael Laudor, particularly this review of this book, I thought about illusions of windows into the minds of people we are close to can only give us a suggestion of what might be happening in their minds. I have also observed that people suffering from mental illness are not necessarily reliable witnesses.

Elizabeth Tingley tells the story of her own life in detailed connection with Michael Laudor's brother Richard. She is a reliable witness, and an honest one.

If Gidi Rosenfeld's review about the shortcomings of Rosen's book resonates with anyone interested in the subject of Michael Laudor or of mental illness, I would suggest reading Elizabeth Tingley's memoir in order to get a more nuanced picture of Michael Laudor.

This is also an important book to read if you are interested in how childhood trauma (and I imagine everyone has childhood trauma to some degree) can, if addressed and worked through with good mental health professionals, be far less of a burden in adulthood than if unaddressed. Elizabeth Tingley became a child psychologist in order to figure out how to process her childhood trauma, and she became a writer in order to be able to write about it. And she did. And I am glad. It just came out last week, and I am honored to be one of the first readers. 

 Here's a link to the book on Amazon.