Adventures in the musical stratosphere

Yesterday one of my violin students, who is also a flutist (there have been quite a few over the years), brought his brand-new wooden piccolo to his lesson. It arrived in the mail while he was in school, and his mother wanted to give it to him right away.

I looked it over, and told him that it looked good (it was from eBay). We went back into thinking about the violin. 

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about how the piccolo might sound. I couldn’t resist it any longer, and asked my student if I could try the piccolo. 

The night before I played viola in a rehearsal of Beethoven Ninth Symphony where I fondly reflected on the pinnacle of my piccolo career: playing piccolo in Beethoven’s Ninth at Carnegie Hall in the early 1980s. I haven’t held a piccolo in my hands since the very early 1990s, when my piccolo went to play in the Detroit Symphony, and I used the money from the sale to buy a violin bow.

So I naturally played the piccolo part of the Beethoven (the march in the last movement). It was thrilling to play. I found my student’s eBay piccolo without a brand name to be just as good as my former Powell. 

Then we went back to our lesson. My left ear hurt a bit after indulging in the joys of the very highest and loudest areas of the musical spectrum. I know that my path to violin, viola, and composition is not only the right path for me, but the more healthy path.

I hope my student gets a lot of joy from playing this sweet instrument.

Just because I can . . .

Instead of making a version of the two William Carlos Williams songs I finished the other day for soprano and piano, I decided to make a version of them for violin and piano to play on my new violin in celebration of its rich and resonant high register. 

You can find the music here and on this page of the IMSLP. You can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Is it darkest just before the dawn?

In 2013 I finished the first of two songs I wanted to set to poems by William Carlos Williams.  Today I finished the second song, making this musical interval between daybreak and dawn about twelve years. After finishing "Daybreak," I wrote the opening measures of "Dawn," but I abandoned the idea of having a set of both songs because I didn't know where to go with it beyond the opening. Now, perhaps inspired by the need for some light during these dark nights of the soul (which are turning into dark months of the soul) that we are all experiencing, I put my head down and plowed forward.

Musical victories may be meaningless to most people, but they are victories to me.

Daybreak

Half a moon is flaming in the south below clear little stars.
Vague shapes begin to stir among
the yellow-poppy street lamps.
Oblique masses of purple and black
lift themselves. Is it earth or sky?
It is the beginning! —again?
Answer, answer! Huntress who spreadest
vitreous dawn before dawn!

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—! lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
songs cease.

I made a post with links to the music on my thematic catalog blog. But, if you like, you can read the poetry and listen to some computer-generated recordings here:

Daybreak
Dawn

Four States of Bean Lunch

It is rare that I have beans in four states available for lunch!

We have mung bean sprouts, raw French green beans, and braised tofu in the bowl. I ate them with a dressing made with tahini, rice vinegar (equal amounts, mixed together until they form a paste) soy sauce (another state of bean!), and a splash of water.

The hummus on the rye cracker is a blend of soaked, sprouted, and cooked chickpeas (sprouted just a tad), garlic flowers from the garden, parsley from the windowsill, fresh lemon juice, sesame tahini, salt, and black pepper.

I had the same lunch yesterday, but I neglected to take a picture.

With all that is going on in the world, I feel that a break for a lunch post is necessary. And now it's time to take a walk on this glorious September day, and tonight I get to play a Haydn String Quartet (the Kaiser, Opus 76 No. 3).

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Competition

After our journey into the world of Coleridge, and after reading a little about his relationship with William Wordsworth, I wondered if there might have been a film made about it. My suspicions proved correct, and I found this film from 2001 very satisfying in many ways.

The writers took liberties when filling in possible sub-plots, and they went back and forth in time a bit much for my taste. But the acting is excellent, the poetry extremely well read, the music (all original) is appropriate for both the time and the place, the visual effects and general cinematography are stimulating and imaginative, and the props (always important for me) felt authentic (unlike period films that look like advertisements in a Pottery Barn catalog). It wasn't easy to find this on YouTube, but here it is.



I suppose that I reacted quite strongly to the character of William Wordsworth because he was portrayed as an extremely competitive person who had a sister, who, by the dictates of society, had to express herself by helping her brother succeed. She wouldn't have thought for a moment to try to compete with her brother.

I like to think that when I was born I was delivered with a "non-compete" clause. My older brother Marshall, who identified a great deal with Wordsworth and his poetry, was competition personafied.

I couldn't compete with Marshall, who had the most absolute form of perfect pitch, though he insisted on competing with me.

I tried my hand at competition outside of the family as a child: trying to be the first to complete the SRA (reading) cards, taking my seating in all-city orchestra as an evaluation of my violin playing, and counting the lines I had in school plays as a way of gauging how important my part (and therefore I) was. I have since learned that there are no small parts, only small actors, and that where you sit in orchestra has no reflection on the quality of your playing.

After getting into Juilliard through what I considered the back door (see the post about doing a color trick to manipulate my teacher, and add to it the fact that Julius Baker taught my mother, and that my father was the principal violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), and never being among the students who did the necesary things to be noticed (giving the impression of being something special by talking a good game and associating with "important" people), I turned inward and tended to my own musical garden, which had its rewards in sound, knowledge, and expression.

I don't do the aggressive promotional stuff that composers and performing musicians do on the internets because I do not have the taste or the skills for business. I have come to realize, however, that it might have more to do with the fact that I have a serious distaste for competition.

Competing for visibility by feeding an algorithm is kind of like counting lines in a play to me. Comparing my playing or writing to someone in a professional position that could be considered "above" mine is also a complete waste of time. 

I value the ability to "say" what I feel is true in music, and am so glad that I can continue to grow, even at this advanced stage of a life devoted to under-employment.

I hope you enjoy the movie, and I hope you find yourself exploring Coleridge's poetry. And Wordsworth's as well. 

Coleridge's "The Nightingale"

When Michael and I read poetry in our two-person reading club, we like to read it aloud. Today was the first time either Michael or I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale," and we both enjoyed it tremendously. 

It struck me, while reading this poem about a bird doing its best to get its thoughts and feelings out while there is time to do so (and, of course, about so much more), that there is a marked difference between reading poetry out loud by yourself and reading poetry out loud to (and with) someone else.

It is not unlike the way playing music by yourself feels different from playing music when someone is listening to you play.

Michael and I are reading our way through the eighty volumes of the "Penguin Little Black Classics." They are small books (around fifty pages long) filled with texts that are in the public domain (some that we might otherwise not have chosen to read). It has been a great adventure in many ways, including an adventure in the documented need for human proofreaders to make sure the names of the writers are spelled correctly on the covers.

Here's case in point:

Michael has a photo of the typo on the cover of the Thomas Nashe volume of the set in this blog post.

Hot Flash!

It is certainly not news to anyone who knows me or plays with me that I am in a perpetual state of thermal challenge. When I was in my fifties it was particularly difficult to handle. For a while there (which might have been a few years) they happened every twenty minutes, practically around the clock.

Concerts were a serious problem, since hot flashes also tend to put me in a state of momentary panic. It was always a win for me when the timing worked out right, and I only flashed during a period of rest or during a break between pieces. I have learned ways to cope. I have had no choice. And, thankfully, when I flash while playing, I no longer panic.

One of the most interesting benefits of playing my new (old) fiddle is that I connect imediately and deeply to the essence of the music I am playing, particularly when it is Haydn or Bach, and particularly when I use an 18th-century bow. When playing this instrument I find myself flashing more often than usual, particularly when I am in the, pardon the expression, heat, of understanding a phrase or passage in a new way.

This new instrument provides a window into harmonic stuff in music I have played for decades that I have simply never been privy to before. So I welcome those flashes of understanding. 

I like to think of the age of flashing as the age of wisdom for women. Harmony is more exciting to me now than it was when I was younger. And I feel like I can hear more counterpoint, and can better appreciate how phrases work within the forms used in the Classical Period.

And what a relief it is to be at a point in my life where I can judge the quality of my work (as both a composer and as a player) myself. My sense of self worth is not based on how I am judged by others. It does make me very happy to play music with friends and colleagues, and it certainly makes me happy when people enjoy playing music I have written, particularly when playing it helps stimulate imagination and musical engagement.

Unique Musical Voices

Michael shared a video of a commercial from the 1960s with me (for reasons I do not need to discuss here), and I immediately recognized Julius Baker's flute playing in the soundtrack. It was as clear to me as it would have been if it had been his speaking voice, a voice I haven't heard for a couple of decades.

I came of flute-playing age in a world where everyone was trying to sound like Julius Baker. My teacher and his generation of Baker students had successfully "cloned" what people referred to as "the Baker sound." People even referred to his students as coming "out of the Bakery."

I started that way too. I prepared for my Juilliard audition by listening very carefully to a recording of Julius Baker playing the slow movement of a Mozart concerto, and made a little mark every time he changed color. During my audition I changed either my tone color or my dynamic to something different from what I had been doing at crucial points. I guess it worked. He took me as a student.

Julius Baker taught by example. He phrased by instinct, while playing the notes exactly as written with excellent rhythm, excellent intonation, and a beautiful sound in every register and every dynamic. He never talked about musical structure, physical form, support, or breathing. 

His secret to teaching was being able to pick students he thought would be successful. He loved being surrounded with adoring students, and was particularly impressed with the ones who could play the piano, as well as the ones who were attractive. He valued appearances, and encouraged me to dress better than I did. He was right: people judge female flutists by how they look. I had no clue how to dress.

Julius Baker was a beekeeper who lived with his wife and children on a small farm (Baker’s Acres) growing mostly wildflowers for the bees. He learned to weld from his hospital roommate (he was there recovering from a heart attack). He jogged every morning, and encouraged his students to do the same. He was a ham radio operator, and communicated with people all over the world. During the late 1940s and mid 1950s he had his own recording company (The Oxford Recording Company). I saw the library of recordings in his basement. I believe he was also a pilot.

He wasn't much of a reader, except of the newspaper, and someone told me that he was kind of a genius with the stock market.

Julius Baker's first instrument was the violin, but he found more success as a flutist (his father was a flutist--and they wrote letters to one another in Yiddish after he left home for Eastman). He told me that the reason he went into music was so that he could get an education. He was a unique human being who was respected and adored by his colleagues, at least from what I saw. He loved being "a regular guy," and would (and did) start conversations with anyone about anything. 

Julius Baker’s favorite musicians were Jascha Heifetz, David Nadien, and Emil Gilels. He found ways to make the flute sound like a violin (a passion that I shared with him), and he could blend with any instrument in the orchestra. He had an array of colors on the flute including some that were kind of brassy and buzzy in the low register, and had a beautiful rolling vibrato that, unlike other flutists of the time, involved the whole air column (like the vibrato of a singer) and not the mouth and throat (you can listen to John Wummer for an example of that). I can’t stand listening to Wummer, who, as the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic,  represented the state of the art before Baker.

While I was in my twenties you could hear the Baker Sound in the flute sections of every American orchestra, and also in orchestras all over the world. But during the last decade of the twentieth century flute playing took several post-Baker turns. 

One big factor was that instruments improved. During the Baker era there were basically two great American flute makers: Haynes and Powell. Then there were spinoff companies like Brannon (my Powell flute was made by Bickford Brannon before he started his own company) that made all kinds of improvements. Japanese companies started making flutes that were easier to play, and spoke particularly well in the low register (so there wasn't a need to buzz). 

Along with physical improvements to the instrument, excellent teachers of the post-Baker generation found new ways to teach, and a lot of new repertoire appeared involving the whole flute family. Suddenly flute players had an enticing array of musical and intellectual challenges.

Flutists (and all musicians) have been able to record themselves easily, as part of regular practice, for half a century. We can slow recordings down and scrub messy passages clean through careful practice. We can even look at images of the sound waves on our phones, and work on the contours to make everything sound perfect. Clean playing that is perfectly in tune and in perfect rhythm wins auditions, and a conservatory education is all about teaching students to win auditions.

I have heard some of that audition-winning clean-as-a-whistle flute playing in person, and have certainly been impressed. The current generation of teachers working in colleges and conservatories (people who began teaching in the twenty-first century) have done an excellent job at training highly capable flutists.

But I doubt that I would be able to distinguish the unique voice of one pristine flute player from this generation of flutists in their twenties from another from behind a screen or on a recording. And there is something kind of sad about that.

Fifteen Minutes of Posture Pilates

I love Rachel Lawrence's Pilates videos. Her The Girl with the Pilates Mat YouTube channel has been a part of our lives for many years.

Today I am facing a very long day of driving, rehearsing, playing into the night, and driving again, so I thought I'd fortify myself by doing this fairly new short video to strengthen my back muscles and improve my posture.

I'm putting it here to share with you (of course), but also so that I can find it easily to do again on days like this.



This photo is from the concert we (an ensemble from the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra) played last August. It looks like the weather will be just as perfect this year.

I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms

I was, of course, curious about the title. The man who knew Brahms was the son of a Viennese pharmacist who was delivering medicine for Brahms to the home of his friend Eduard Hanslick. This man, who Nancy Shear, the writer of this memoir, met in the library of the Philadelphia Orchestra, also knew Mahler.

I was also intrigued by what I hoped would be descriptions of the work of an orchestral librarian. Though I am happy with the path in music that I have taken, there was one point during my early teens when I used to hang around the Berkshire Music Center music library that was housed backstage in the Theater at Tanglewood mainly so I could watch the people working there write with their italic pens and I could pick their brains.

It is indeed rare to find a memoir written by a librarian, particularly a music librarian, but there was enough librarian-related stuff here to satisfy my particular needs.

Mostly this book concerns the growth of a music-loving teenager who played the cello, and her path into and through the world of music by way of her working relationships with librarians and orchestral musicians and her personal relationships with some of the most powerful men in the "old school" musical world of the twentieth century.

Shear approached Leopold Stokowski the morning of February 3, 1964 and asked him if she could come to attend a rehearsal. I suppose the pleasure of having an eager teenage girl with blond hair (who, according to her grown-up publicity photo must have been pretty as a child) ask to attend a rehearsal, even if rehearsals were strictly closed, outweighed the idea of breaking her heart. That began a long working relationship which became an intimate personal one, but, thank goodness, only after Shear had become an adult.

She offers a great deal of insight into the mind and manner of Stokowski. Some of it I knew, and some I didn't. I don't share the general adoration for Stokowski's work that some do, but I can save that for another post.

Shear, who must have kept a careful diary during those years, also writes at length about Eugene Ormandy and Mstislav Rostropovich. She was particularly close with Rostropovich, and the picture she paints of him is a genuine likeness of the man I observed giving masterclasses at Tanglewood in the 1970s. Her portrait is much more intimate, and I would say is required reading for people who admire him and his work.

Another important element in the book (and I would say the most important element) is the look at how a woman fared professionally in the world of music in the 1960s and the 1970s. Shear, who was certainly qualified for an orchestra library job after her five years of work at in the Philadelphia Orchestra's library, her work in the rental library of Theodore Presser, and her work as a freelance editors (even working with Vincent Presichetti), didn't get the job because she was a woman.

Her interviewer asked her what would happen if her husband wouldn't want her to work at some point (she wasn't married, and didn't intend to get married). He also asked her how she could carry all the heavy parts, scores, and folders. She replied that she could make two trips or use a cart with wheels. She did manage to get a job at the Curtis Institute in her home town of Philadelphia (she called Rudolf Serkin, a frequent soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, who knew that they needed a librarian who could manage orchestra rehearsals and out-of-town concerts). That gave her summers free, so she could go visit Leopold Stokowski, who had left Philadelphia for England.

And the story becomes most interesting. I won't spoil it for you.

 You can find out more about the book here.

Bach to Haydn in Plain Sight

We wake up to such awful news every day. Every day. And every day I do my best to keep it together by practicing Bach and Haydn on the violin, the viola, and the piano.

It gives me a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day, and gives me something to look forward to for the next day. Rinse and repeat.

I hope that this terrible period in history will end, and I hope that it ends in such a way that I can play Bach and Haydn to celebrate the beginning of better times. But in the meantime I am so very grateful that I have this music to play.

The Alma Mahler Doll

You can read all about it here, in the Public Domain Review, one of the great places on the internet.

Notes from Underground

I really enjoy the fact that my little space here in the musical internets, on a platform designed for sharing thoughts rather than for making money, is visited by a handful of people who are interested in engaging on mostly musical matters.

So much has changed in the political landscape of the country I happen to live in. But as far as I can "see" as I read about history mostly through literature and music, political landscapes always change. Little pockets of civilization happen within larger pockets of civilization here and there, and if we are lucky those creative people leave their mark in the form of music, art, or literature (including plays and poetry, of course).

If we are lucky there are (or were) people who have the wherewithal to recognize when something is of value. If we are really lucky there are (or were) people who are able to see and hear value that goes beyond the price that someone can get for it, whatever it is. And then anything that survives across the centuries and cultures is a tremendous gift from those kind (and sometimes greedy) souls who managed to preserve it from harm during times of war, natural disasters, or simply natural decay.

I feel so fortunate to have spent my entire life (up to this point) in the safety of a democratic society. Whether that safety will be preserved throughout the lives of our children and our grandchildren is not something I can be sure of. But something about me feels assured that the things I value in life will endure in spite of how governments change, if only because they have endured.

I think of CPE Bach and his servitude in the court of Frederic the Great (he was hired as an accompanist, and would never become promoted to the role of court composer). I think of the Mozart family's struggles with monarchs. I think of Haydn who worked as a musical servant until his patron was no longer in need of his services. I think of Beethoven who, despite having a less-than-gracious personality, developed relationships with the very musical Viennese aristocracy, only to have them stomped on by Napoleon. I think of Schubert, who, as a teacher, didn't make enough money to marry his fianceé at a time when local laws decreed how much a man had to make in order to marry. She married someone else, and he got syphilis.

But a lot of the music, thankfully, has been preserved. A lot of the music that was played or written down over the past several thousand years was not preserved, and what it was and how it sounded we will never know.

The business of music had a great ascension during the 19th century. Thanks to enterprising instrument makers and publishers, not to mention performing establishments and salons, musical life was rich and varied. And patrons were also rich and varied.

Wagner and Liszt lived like royalty. Brahms, the Schumanns, the Mendelssohns, and their friends made excellent livings playing concerts and teaching. Opera singers like Pauline Viardot were in positions where they could live from and for their art. Verdi made enough money to build a retirement home for singers.

And then came recordings. Edison, being the brilliant inventor/opportunist that he was, managed to get recorded music (performed by the most recognizable artists of the day) and the machines used to play it into living rooms across America, and around the world.

The twentieth century, for a variety of reasons, and mostly through European musicians relocating to New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles, was the American musical century, at least as far as “classical” music is concerned.

My childhod was subsidized by the Boston Symphony (my father was a member). And the musician's union made it possible for musicians to work for fair wages and under safe conditions.

The support of very wealthy people living in a democratic society made all this possible. Those wealthy people also supported institutions of higher learning, and there was money from the government for research that created possibilies for science and medicine that went far beyond what anyone could imagine in the twentieth century.

Now the government seems to be systematically kneecapping every institution: educational, scientific, and even cultural (though the powers that be don't--thankfully, and for the moment--seem to know what may or may not be of value). But education, science, and culture cannot be destroyed. Scientists will move elsewhere. Culture (as I know it) can move underground, a place where it has gone from time to time across the millenia. And under the umbrella of culture we have music, art, history, poetry, drama, and education. Religion, in some of its forms, might go there as well.

Individual human beings, being mortal, have finite lifetimes. Those of us who have something to share with the rest of our race (the human race, of course), can do our best to share the richness of what we know and where we have been with the generations that will, undoubtedly, follow us.

If the trajectory that I see (I'm thinking that we could be all speaking Russian, for example) is somehow averted, we still need to keep both our wits and skills about us.

So rather than spending all your time fretting about where things are going, I would suggest doing everything in your power to resist using artificial intelligence to do your researching and writing, read literature you have always wanted to read, watch films that you have always wanted to watch, follow new paths to find books and films you have never known about, and engage in as many in-person musical activities you can, whether as a participant or as a listener.

How close we have gotten to general acceptance of the notion that people can love who they choose to love. How close we have gotten to the idea of having the decision to be a parent (or not be) one that any person can make. How close we have gotten to the (obvious) notion that women and men are equal both intellectually and creatively, and it is up to the individual person to develop that intellect and that creativity.  

During my sixty-six years of life I have watched technology and human understanding move forward by leaps and bounds, at least in what we call the developed world. Let's hope that the backwards fall (involving war, famine, natural disasters due to climate change, and repression) that we are now experiencing in real time is one that the human race can recover from in the twenty-first century. 

The Little Fiddle, and the Parlor Guitar

There comes a time, it seems, at least in the musical universe when things come together. Yesterday was such a day.

We went to St. Louis to meet our son, who was there for the day on a business trip. We had a great lunch and a visit to the soap store in the Hill, and then, simply because I thought they would both be enchanted and amazed by Geoff Seitz's violin shop, we stopped in there. I had been to the shop many times before, but never with Michael.

Geoff had "my" little fiddle, an instrument made in 1791 that I had met and "mingled with" on many a visit, all tuned up (I did let him know we were coming), but I really did not expect that it would come home with me.

I had been expecting for years that I would inherit my father's Scarampella violin, but circumstances must have changed since I spoke about it with him several years before his death. 

Of all the instruments I have played over the years, I have never had the opportunity to choose one for myself. I have had a flute, a piccolo, a baroque flute, and a violin made for me, before I really knew what to ask for. I bought a viola at a garage sale. One recorder was given to me as a gift, and the others I bought "off the rack" without knowing what to look for in a recorder. The flute I have now was my mother's, and my viola and viola d'amore were both my father's. Our piano (which I love) came to us for free from the radio station where I once worked.

Though I have chosen instruments for others, and I though have chosen bows for myself, I have never been able to "meet" and fall in love with an instrument that one day would be mine.

Twenty-five years ago my father gave his Becker instrument to my brother Marshall, and he gave an instrument he no longer had use for to me as well, just to be fair, I guess.  After Marshall's death I inherited the Becker from both my parents (it is complicated). As soon as I tried the Becker, I no longer had any desire to play the viola my father gave to me, so I made a contract with Geoff to sell it for me.

On the way to St. Louis I contemplated the possibility of doing a little barter if we happened to find a parlor guitar for Michael (he had been toying with the idea of wanting one for many years) in Geoff's shop, and maybe something for our son, if he found something he wanted.

Geoff happened to have the most beautiful parlor guitar I have ever heard or seen: a 19th-century instrument in beautiful condition with a warm, and almost baritone-rich sound. I asked Geoff about doing the barter thing with the guitar and the little fiddle (plus a really nice bow), and he was fine with it.

So now I have a really good violin, an instrument that I have chosen myself. It is not valuable like the Scarampella would be (last I looked they were going for 200 grand), but it has a true soprano violin sound, and an enormous amount of musical character. I think I will call her "Antonia" after the character named Antonio in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Councillor Krespel."

And if I choose to imagine that my father would prefer this instrument to the Scarampella (which I do), and if I choose to imagine that Antonia could be, in the spirit of the magic that happens in the Hoffmann story, a kind of inheritance from my father, I can. 

And it is also a great gift that I get to listen to Michael play his remarkable new instrument.

And they sound great together.

Flute Etudes

During the almost two decades I devoted to being a flutist I spent thousands of hours practicing flute etudes. Even though I know that flute playing really should be done by people for whom it really is their voice, there is a part of that period of my life that I still embrace.

I do, for example, love writing for the instrument, and I particularly love it when something I write is played by a honest-to-goodness great flutist. I have been fortunate to have known many.

When I was asked to write a group of flute etudes for the Illinois Music Teachers Association last February, I shamelessly "asked" for my highest ideals of flute playing, while trying to make the music accessible enough to be played and understood by high school flutists.

I just came across these video recordings made by Jonathan Keeble, the flute professor at the University of Illinois (and sometimes principal flutist in the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra), and after hearing him play the two "senior" etudes, the flutist's heart that beat in my heart through much of my teens and all of my twenties is still a-flutter.