The Prize and Price of Peace

We all really need the example of María Corina Machado in order to alter the path that this assault of authoritarianism is taking. It gives me hope to know that people everywhere who need to devise ways of working for democracy will be able to learn from her efforts.

The price of peace is very high. We have to work at it all the time.

I was disappointed when she told a person who believed he should have gotten the prize that she was accepting it in honor of him, but after some reflection I think that by doing so she might have, as women so often do in families, simply being a peacemaker. Smart women have been known to sacrifice their egos for a greater good.

And I have a feeling that we might see safer waters for fishing boats, at least for a while.

Elizabeth Roberts, Harlequin Extrordinaire

Elizabeth Roberts, the principal bassoonist of the Charlotteville Symphony and the bassoon professor at the University of Virginia gave a great performance of my Harelquin Sonata this afternoon. The video below should start right before the piece does (about 48 minutes in), but there is no reason that you shouldn't watch and listen to the rest of the program as well. What an excellent bassoonist and contrabassoonist she is!

Art and Craft

Christopher Gordon Forbes, in old blogosphere style, poses a daily question on his Contemporary Composers Collective page on Facebook.

Today’s question was a good one:

How much do you view yourself as an artist, and how much as a craftsperson? Is there a distinction between the two?

I enjoyed answering it there, and am happy that I can share it here.

Without craft there is no art. I think of craft as the “how,” and whatever happens when a human being interacts with whatever I do as an answer to a “why.” Maybe that’s the art part, but it has very little to do with me, unless I happen to be the person who is expressing herself through a piece I happen to have written.  If I don’t get the “craft” right, that possibility for expression is not as clear as I might have hoped. And without expression (of something) I don’t believe there is art.

Jonathan Brodie, Guest Blogger

From his substack "Adventures in the Clef Trade"

In memory of Abraham Chavez

And the music played on and the mercury just went higher

It’s just the vertical expression of horizontal desire . . .

[The Bellamy Brothers]

Why not go both horizontal and vertical at the same time? But where is it possible to do that? Try a string quartet. Take a seat with your buddies and play through the second violin or viola part. Preferably Franz Joseph Haydn because who else? Even though you are sitting down, the middle voice gives you the illusion, no…the realisation that you are simultaneously standing tall and pushing your feet down into the floor. You hear what’s up and know what’s down. That takes care of the vertical. Now you are able to take a peek over the music stand and see the first violinist holding close in the hollow of the box all manner of tuneful stuff while your feet feel the shakes of the cellist offering the solace of fundamental things. So where’s the horizontal? Here: you are spread flat and and thin in between two upscale neighborhoods; while peering from this middle place you are moving your eyes across the page of your music from left to right. It was type-set that way by a 19th century typesetter in Danzig or Vienna on that old and patched Peters Edition. You are in two different places at the same time; and I don’t mean East St. Louis and rural Moline. Illinois.

In the midst of a string quartet is the place to be. Forget Moline.

But let’s go back to Boulder, Colorado. That is where, in 1975 at my University, I encountered for the first time the happy business of being inside such an ensemble and to play a middle voice. The group consisted of three Graces and had conveniently just lost their violist as “Four Graces” doesn’t sound right. What led the temporary trio to invite me, a scattered and undisciplined violin student, to fill the position? I will never know. The invitation was accepted immediately if not sooner. Apparently, if properly motivated, I could put my aleatoric meanderings aside and find the center. It took me less than a day to pretend to read the alto clef more or less accurately. The motivation for this education had nothing to do with gaining more musical perspective and everything to do with the social embellishments of the ensemble that issued the invitation.

A perfect-accuracy reading score in the new clef used by violists wasn’t in the cards. This was because instead of figuring out the actual pitches notated on the page and then calculating where those notes were to be found on the fingerboard, I resorted to a foolish transposing method that frequently, but not always, worked. It should be described here just in case a violinist asked to play viola is tempted to try such a dubious method of learning alto clef. Maybe describing it will alert the potential victim to sniff out the dangers found on such a sketchy street. My advice is to take a little extra time and know the names of the notes you are playing. Don’t use the following tactic:

Even though you are holding a viola, pretend you are still playing your violin and still reading treble clef. Then place your finger two whole steps lower than the note under consideration, and sound the note. Be sure to have a look of serenity and wisdom that comes sooner and usually later comes to the face of all violists. To some, after they are dead.

My problem in those days was that I was so constantly distracted by the strangeness and exoticness of the world around me that I found it difficult to learn new things. Everything was remarkably peculiar or radiant. Sometimes both at the same time. All I could do was witness. My new string quartet was working on Beethoven’s charming Opus 18. No. 4, but the charm of my colleagues interfered with my being able to fulfil my charge; to express competently and expressively the manifold charms of the Beethoven while staying at least approximately in tune. The impediment to reaching this standard happened mostly because my attention and priorities lay elsewhere. Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s words describe my state of mind exactly. To work on Opus 18 with those musicians was like working “with the first plough in the childhood of the world.” I was so stunned by the ambiance of the situation that I couldn’t concentrate on being a musician. All I could do was luxuriate in the warmth of the new-found land where miraculously and unaccountably, I found myself. I was a tourist, not a music-maker.

It was no better with my violin lessons. My teacher was the extraordinary Abraham Chavez. His musical abilities were profound. He could transpose unaccompanied Bach sonatas and partitas into any key at a moment’s notice without benefit of the score. His solfege skills were unexcelled. When asked to whistle any snippet presented to him from the score that lay on his desk and he would do so with pitch-perfect accuracy. During my lessons he would demonstrate passages from the music I was studying while holding a lit cigarette in his right hand. When he moved the hair of his bow from the tip to the base of the stick, his unfiltered Camel would briefly be positioned over the exquisitely formed f-holes of his Stradivarius. How could I take in his musicianship and pedagogical insights when my principal preoccupation was wondering if burning ash would fall onto the top of that rare instrument and then through the sound holes into the sacred interior.

When unhappy with the sloppiness of the University Orchestra’s rendering of the opening bars of The Marriage of Figaro Overture, this Magus played the passage impeccably, to show how it should be done. Perched on his tall three-legged stool in front of the ensemble, he first played it on violin, followed by viola, then cello. This last instrument was hard to hold while he sat on his high stool. He held the cello with his legs, the sharp point of end-pin jutting out crazily towards the orchestra like a weapon but not interfering with the dexterity of the fingers of his left hand. The message implied by the awkward position of the cello’s endpin was not lost on the orchestra. We were a perceptive bunch.

But he wasn’t finished. He left the podium and went to the bass section and played. And then the woodwind section, where the bassoon was, and rendered the notes expressively on that instrument as well. That was it. Mozart hadn’t scored the passage for any other instruments. But had the Marimba been part of the orchestration of the passage, it was certain that this conductor would have nailed it on the wooden keys.

How could I learn from Abraham Chavez? All I could do was gawk and wonder.

Occasionally his actions percolated into the mystic. Hanging from the chain on his neck were several emblems that revealed that, beyond music. he was walking an esoteric path. Most prominent of these emblems was the Rose Cross and a Magan David to show that he was both a Rosicrucian and a Marrano. Why be one when you can be both? Once a bass student, confused about the time of his orchestra try-out, showed up during my lesson time. Welcomed to audition then and there, he asked what he should play; an excerpt from the repertoire, a scale, or solo. Professor Chavez told him there was no need to play anything. He removed a pendulum that was housed in the vicinity of the Rose Cross and Six-pointed Star and dangled it in front of the astonished candidate. It moved clockwise. “You’re in” said Professor Chavez. My lesson then continued, but I remember none of it. To this day I recall nothing Abraham Chavez taught me that day. That lacunae applies to the totality of the lessons I took with him. This failure to learn is on me. The virtuosity blinded me. I didn’t have the strength to pick up at least a few glittering shards that my teacher was offering.

There was still something else that got in the way. I sensed that to better hold and replicate the graceful violinistic motions this artist was teaching, I had to become a convert to an obscure, almost unrevealed knowledge. Alas that an innate skepticism prevented me from becoming an initiate. Had I thrown aside suspicion and entered the temple, I could have learned more and become a better violin player. Instead of entering, I tried to look but vapours from the burning stick took the shape of a knotty curtain that hid what was behind.

My teacher’s knowledge was obscured by what I was able to see: a pebble slowly moving; and then smoke drifting vertically and horizontally until it became a whirlwind rotating counter-clockwise.

Happy Anniversary #41 to us!

[Drawn by our son Ben for our 40th anniversary]

Michael posted a view from the front on his blog today.

Audience for Classical Music in 2025

A person with a microphone and a video camera standing a few yards away from a Toronto concert hall posed the question, "Why it is so difficult for everyday people to just go in and enjoy a classical concert?" to two young women.

Here is my edited transcription of what the first person said:

“I know for me when you think about classical music you tend to think about a white demographic. I feel that people won't see it's catered to them in a specific way. But I feel like it's not very welcoming in that space, like people just think, it's not for me, it's not catered to me, or maybe it's not sounds specifically that they're looking for.  But it is something you don't really think about right away, like that's a space that I can go in and just like be seen, and then enjoy with my friends.”

The second person agreed with her friend, and added that there wasn't a feeling of access, and that classical music was only for a certain group of people. She said that it lacked visibility, and that it should be advertised so that it could be "really out there."

While the institutions and organizations that prepare and present concerts have evolved a great deal to become more inclusive, and have gone out of their way to use social media to reach people during the past couple of decades, I fear that the attitude of young adults not exposed to classical music in childhood (for whatever reason) might be stuck in the past.

I have written many blogposts about the audience for classical music over the years on this blog (you can read them through this link). Some posts might be relevant in the context of this post, and some might not be that relevant.

Let’s hope that we continue to remember the strides we have made, and can continue to let young people know that their engagement is really welcome.

Pain

I kind of overdid it practicing viola over the past few days. After all the comfortable violin playing I have been doing over the summer, the reality of orchestral obligations has gotten me back into viola practice. And the most immediate chanllenges involve complicated passages that involve a lot of crossing between the C string and the G string.

This means that the repetitive lifting of my right arm at angles I am not used to has caused some muscle strain. So I have had to be careful, and I have had to be efficient in my practicing.

I came across this article today about how musicians feel pain differently from people who aren't musicians, and thought I would share it here.

I always thought that musicians are able to withstand a certain amount of pain because the pleasure of playing and the pleasure of the music produced endorphins. But this study involves the way the act of playing music reshapes our brains.

Power, Anger, Music, and Women

Yesterday I heard myself say (out loud) that I was angry. Anger is not one of the expressions that I habitually practice, and before yesterday it was an expression that I allowed myself to experience silently. It threw me for a loop. I lost sleep. And I am still thinking about it.

In the wee hours of the morning I started searching for poems concerning anger written by women (public domain poems, naturally) that I could consider setting to music, and though I found poems that were cynical, witty, biting, clever, or self-deprecating, I couldn't find a poem that had either the need for music or the room for it.

Twenty-five or so years ago, when I wrote my Snow Queen opera (based on the Hans Christian Andersen story), I had to create a motivation for the Snow Queen's malevolence. The Snow Queen, who I named after the goddes Skadi, from Norse Mythology, sings this aria to express her anger.

I adapted the text from a poem by Elmer Diktonius.

Skadi was a giant, an all-powerful goddess of Norse Mythology. In order to avenge the death of her father, she was allowed to choose a husband from among the gods, but she was forced to choose her husband with a scarf tied around her eyes so she could only see his feet. Skadi picked the god with the nicest feet, thinking he was Baldr, the handsomest of the gods, but the nicest feet unfortunately belonged to Njord, the god of the sea coast.

Their marriage was short and unhappy. This aria suggests lonlieness as Skadi's motivation for abducting an innocent boy, and the boy, named Kay, is attracted to the Skadi because a sliver of glass from a goblin's mirror that is lodged in his eye makes everything beautiful look ugly, and everything ugly look appealing. Another sliver of mirror glass that pierced Kay's heart is slowly turning it into a lump of ice.

Skadi's anger is also a result of her powerlessness in a male-dominated society that had little need for women.

Lack of power for mortal (and real) women happens at home, at work, and in social organizations (religious, civic, educational, and arts-related). It was prevalent when I was a child, it was there when our children were children, and it is still firmly in place, even in situations when there are a large number of smart, outspoken, and capable women.

One of the reasons I love writing music is that I have ultimate power over every note I write. It is a great feeling of accomplishment to get them to behave the way I want them to, and then to sit back and know that I did the best that I could do within the confines of my "canvas." (I am sure I am not alone in my experience.)

I am not angry about the fact that what I write might not mean much of anything to the majority of people. I am not angry about the fact that some musicians don't care for the music I write. And I don't harbor anger about the auditions I have lost (in my flute-playing days), or the rejections I have gotten from "calls for scores." Music is not an angry space for me, which is one reason why I find solace, freedom, and stimulation from practicing it, performing it, and writing it. 

But when I see and hear anger coming from the mouths of elected and non-elected officials on the television directed at professional people who ask necessary questions, it sends me into a very dark place.

Nobody likes being yelled at. I have been berated, insulted, criticized, and belittled by a handful of people during my six and a half decades of life, and each time left what feels like a permanent mark on my spirit. I can't recall a single time when I expressed loud anger directly at someone for something that they did to me. I have cut off contact with people who have offended me or members of my family. And I have turned anger inward.

Now that I have voiced my anger, and now that I have written this post, I'm hoping for some smoother sailing through the anger-saturated landscape we are facing. I have looked anger in the face, and am hoping that recognizing and expounding upon my relationship with anger might help me to navigate through the rough waters that are all around us and ahead of all of us here on the Earth.

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.