Holiday Strings Concert in Charleston December 6!

This is the first concert of the winter season for me. And it is a great excuse to share this image of an oil painting made by my mother, June Fine.

A Whole New World and The Same Old Me (but a little older)

The longer you live, the more you see. The more you experience, the more you value the things that haven't changed too much.

Musically (and outside of my own musical changes) I have seen worlds around me accept and reject trends. Serialism, or what my father used to call "Mickey Mouse music," made its way into the highest eschelons of musical performance, even though the musicians at the top of the "classical" musical profession had a really difficult time putting their hearts and souls into it.

Fortunately most people in the listening audience couldn't tell whether the sounds those musicians were making were happening at the proper times. If a skilled professional has a hard time hearing complicated cross rhythms, your average music-savvy listener isn't going to know whether playing correctly or not. Same with intervals that exist between the "cracks" of the keyboard. I have not yet met a musician who could accurately divide a whole step into "slices" smaller (or slightly larger) than a quarter tone. And quarter tones need to be tuned by ear to match the guesses of the other people in an ensemble playing or singing them in order to get that brownish quarter-tone color that some of us recognize as correct.

Please challenge me on this point. I have asked before, and have never gotten a response.

After a long time of listening and playing, I can hear quarter tones, but if I try to sing them it is always a random guess as to where the pitch should go--never a measurement.

I have witnessed technical playing levels in young people (people in their twenties) escalate. I have heard tremendous improvements in wind-player intonation, thanks, in part, to excellent teaching and instruments that are far better than the ones I grew up with.

The musical world I grew up in was dominated by men. Most of the music that I heard in orchestral concerts was written by men. Nearly all orchestral concerts were conducted by men. A female brass player was an anomaly. Female wind players were treated differently from their male colleagues.

Orchestral jobs were hard to get, but somehow, when audition procedures for non-major orchestras became fair, the best players for the job often turned out to be female. This happened in orchestras in major cities, and it happened in orchestras in smaller cities. (The ugly truth behind salary discrepancies between men and women principal wind players in major orchestras didn't come to light until a few years ago.)

We all know that women have been writing music for a very long time, and we all know that music written by women appears on a relative handful of programs of orchestral music. A great many dedicated people tried to change this a few years ago. A few succeeded for a time, but I'm not seeing any kind of practice really stick in the world (Midwestern United States) around me. I have written a lot on the subject of composers who are women here. You can read a bunch of posts here, if you are interested.

But I keep on keeping on, because I trust that the world around me will keep changing. Clearly social media and the bottom-feeding gleaning and regurgitating device that calls itself intelligence will never give me an accurate report on whether people play the music I write or not, but I will just keep on doing what I do, because it is what I do.

Recognition means very little to me. I am wired not to believe it when someone says something good about me or what I have written. I do, however, know when something I do is something of quality, and it pleases me greatly when someone recognizes that quality and uses it to further their expressive musical experience.

And I know when I am playing in tune, counting correctly, and when I am communicating with my musical colleagues in a meaningful way.

In an Old House in Paris à 4

In 2020, when musicians were figuring out ways to connect remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I devised a musical conversation that could be held between two people over the internet. Because of the technical factors that make listening and playing at the same time impossible, like the slight delay (latency), the meter and timings had to be carefully planned in order for the musical conversation to be a fulfilling experience.

I made versions of this two-voice piece for every combination of instruments that I could think of, and enjoyed playing it with a great many people.

At the suggestion of the Academy String Quartet, I recently made an adaptation of the piece for string quartet. I simplified the meters, and added some harmony and counterpoint so that it could be played by an in-person string quartet. I expanded a few sections, but the spirit of the piece remains the same.

The rhythms of the musical motives correlate exactly with those of a well-known book for children that begins with the phrase, “In an old house in Paris.” The text is not reproduced in the score, but anyone familiar with the text should be able to puzzle together which musical phrase fits with which phrase in the text. It is my hope that the music can stand without the necessity of the text being heard by the audience, but the incorporation of a narrator would certainly be fun.

You can find the score and parts here, and also on this page of the IMSLP, under the transcriptions tab.

Wiegala for SSA choir, vocal soloist, and orchestra

"Day and Night," the image I used for the cover of the score, was made by the thirteen-year-old Eva Lora Sternová (1929-1942), one of the children imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp (transport AF no. 254 on March 3, 1942). Before her deportation she lived in Brno. After spending seven weeks in Terezín, Eva was sent to Izbica (transport Aq, no. 647 on April 27, 1942), and murdered there.

Ilse Weber (neé Herlinger) (1903-1944) was born in Witkowitz, in what became the Czech Republic, wrote children’s books, and worked as a producer for the Czech Radio in Prague. She was sent to Terezín on February 8, 1942 (Transport W, no 995), where she worked as a night nurse for children. Weber was sent from Terezín to Zamość on April 28, 1942 (Transport Ar, no 16) and spent two years, there. She was sent to Auschwitz on April 10, 1944 (Transport En, no. 1064), where she was murdered.

Ilse Weber wrote many poems and songs while in Terezín, Zamość, and Auschwitz, the best-known being “Wiegala.” Aviva Bar-On, one of the surviving children Weber looked after while in Terezín, remembered the song from her time there.

Ilse Weber and Eva Sternová were in Terezín at exactly the same time, and because Weber was in charge of the children, it is possible that the image of the moon as a lantern in Eva’s drawing might have even been inspired by the second stanza of the song (or Eva’s image might have inspired Ilse’s lyric). It is difficult not to see it as a picture of the moon as a lantern looking down on the world.

This setting for vocal soloist (any voice type), and chamber orchestra (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and strings, with a passage for solo violin) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony for a concert commemorating Kristallnacht, given yesterday, November 9, 2025, at Temple Adat Shalom in Los Angeles, with Noreen Green conducting.

The text of the song is in the public domain, I made the translation, and the cover image by Eva Lora Sternová, comes from the collections of the ©Jewish Museum in Prague. This image is used by permission for inclusion here and in the IMSLP. You can go here to find it in the IMSLP, and can also find the score and parts here.

Dido and Aeneas and Gilbert and Sullivan

I do not claim to be any kind of scholar, but sometimes I notice things that occupy my mind.

Now that the (very short) run I played of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is over (I got to play my new-to-me old violin with a baroque bow), I am allowing myself the chance to follow up on some observations I had about the opera. I ask you in advance to forgive me for assaulting your ears with YouTube ads before the samples.

The first thing that caught my ear was the chorus of sailors at the beginning of act three (in Dido and Aeneas):

which reminded me of "No Never" from H.M.S. Pinafore (sung here by Kelsey Grammar playing the part of Sideshow Bob, singing the part of the Captain of the Pinafore):

Then from The Pirates of Penzance I noticed that "Stay Frederic, stay!" Nay Mabel, nay,"



has a parallel (at least for me) in Act three of Dido and Aeneas, at the moment Aeneas tells Dido that he will stay, but Dido urges him to leave because Jove told him to:



There is a pervasive "sense of duty" motive connected with Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid that I can't seem to stop associating with Frederic's pervasive sense of duty, remembering that the alternate title for The Pirates of Penzance is "The Slave of Duty."

Maybe it is all the stuff of the British opera stage, and is otherwise meaningless, which is probably why I found nothing about in JSTOR articles or on google, save an "incipit" from the google "artificial intelligence" telling me that sometimes Pirates and Dido were performed on the same program.

Maybe it happened once. I can imagine the two operas sharing a set, but it would have been a long night for the audience and the singers.

My Two Cents on Weight Loss Drugs

A whole lot of people in the United States are unable to buy enough food to feed themselves and their families, while working at jobs that do not have salaries high enough to pay for the necessities of life. And people who rely completely on SNAP benefits might not have the time or the cooking knowledge to live on the $6 per day (per person in a household). Shelf-stable foods that can be bought in bulk like peanut butter, and Ramen noodles, lentils, beans, and rice could keep a person from starving. Those staples could be augmented occasionally with longer-lasting and inexpensive root vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and onions, but how much of your six dollars per week can be devoted to creating and maintaining enough food to make buying in bulk make sense when you have (as a single person) limits. And what if you need to pay rent, pay for a car, go to a doctor, take medication.

And what happens when SNAP benefits are stopped because of a government shutdown? Local (non-federal-government) organizations help. As a species, most human beings seem more than willing to help.

So in the middle of all this lack of adequate food for adequate nutrition, we have weight loss drugs being made more affordable for people to try and achieve a BMI that fits a profile that the medical establishment has deemed healthy.

I have had, as many people with the ability to have a life where food insecurity has never been a problem, times when my BMI has been thirty or forty pounds above the "normal" range on the chart (eating to excess for pleasure, eating to excess for emotional reasons, eating after concerts).

I remember encountering "the chart" in the Junior High School library, and though I was a healthy seventh grader, my weight fell into the "obese" range for my height. It messed me up, for sure, and for decades.

But I am not "wired" to be a thin person, and, through eating three healthy meals a day filled with foods that I really like, I weigh pretty much the same as I did when I was in seventh grade. I have no desire (or ability) to achieve normalcy.

Back to weight loss drugs. I don't have a problem with people using them if they feel they need them, and are in a position to afford to use them for the short term (until they figure out how to eat less and exercise regularly in a way that works for their bodies) or for the long term (for the rest of their lives).

It's the "rest of their lives" thing that gets me. It becomes a dependency that drains money from the pocket of the person who needs the drug into the pocket of the company that makes it.

Doctors can (and do) perscribe weight loss drugs because of the benefits that being out of the obese range on the chart can have on the general health of the body.

I'm not so sure that "fashionably thin" is the healthiest way to be. But I'm not a doctor. I have a good one, though. She says I’m just fine.

Paying even the reduced price for the drugs that the current occupant of the White House negotiated in exchange for quicker approval of the drugs, means that you are paying a price to a corporation in order to make the state of your body conform to some kind of otherwise impossible-to-maintain ideal.

There's something wrong about that. Opiates and alcohol are addictive. Weight-loss drugs don’t seem to be, but the psychological toll that stopping them and regaining lost weight seems enormous.

And what if there has not been enough research done of the long-term effects of putting a chemical into your body?

New Issues of Ravel Pavane for Viola and Piano and Smyth Bonny Sweet Robin at IMC

I worked very hard to maintain the original spirit, markings, and voicing that Maurice Ravel used in the 1899 piece he wrote for solo piano. It took a great deal of thought to make it work, and I am pleased with the "viola-ness" of the result.

Dame Ethel Smyth wrote a handful of chamber music pieces while she was in Germany but spent the bulk of her career in England writing large-scale works. She returned to chamber music in her late 60s, and her Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin for flute, oboe, and piano, which she completed in 1927, is one of her last works. Smyth’s hearing started to deteriorate during her 60s, and by her 75th birthday she had become completely deaf.

The popular sixteenth-century melody “Bonny Sweet Robin” is also known as “My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone.” Variations on it by Giles Farnaby and John Munday appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. It is referred to as “Ophelia’s Song” because the character of Ophelia sings “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” during what Laertes calls her “document in madness” in Act 4, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The text of the original song has been lost, but scholars believe “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” is the last line of “Bonny Sweet Robin.”

Johannes Brahms, who liked to characterize people as orchestral instruments, called Ethel Smyth “the oboe.” Whether it was because of her piercing personality or the pitch and resonance of her voice, we will never know. But we do know that Smyth chose to write this late piece for the oboe.

The precedent for substituting a violin or a viola for the oboe involves “Two Interlinked French Folk Melodies,” another piece set for flute, oboe, and piano that Smyth wrote around the same time. The first performance of that piece was given with a violinist playing the oboe part. This edition comes with violin and viola versions of the oboe part (which is why they asked me to edit it).

You can find the music by way of the International Music Company's New Issues page here.

Milkweed

Musical Assumptions encounters Popular Culture: 6 7

A few years ago I wrote a book of shifting pieces (in versions for both violin and viola) called "Dancing on the Fingerboard," where I gave the ultimate piece, which uses sixth and seventh positions, a title that I thought quite appropriate for both the physical matter of navigating high up on the fingerboard, and the musical "sense" of the piece.

Who knew that the numbers involved here would be the stuff of popular culture?

Second Acts

 Bravo to Lisa Hirsch for this excellent article!

Oat-Cranberry-Walnut Muffins

I love having oats soaked overnight with cranberries for breakfast. I add walnuts in the morning, and eat it with some Greek yogurt. But this past weekend, when I went out of town to play a Beethoven program (the Prometheus Overture, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Ninth Symphony) I needed to do something with my Sunday morning portion of oats sitting in the fridge (I make three day's worth at a time in a mason jar). The hotel I was staying in didn't have breakfast, so I decided, in willy-nilly style, to make some muffins with the mixture.

The muffins turned out great, so, while I still remembered what I did, I wrote it down.

It's kind of like improvising and then composing, I guess. But you get to eat the results.

Here's the recipe:

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put paper liners in a muffin tin (the recipe makes nine muffins).

In a 2-cup glass measuring cup combine

1 and 1/4 cups rolled oats and 1/2 cup dried cranberries. 

Cover the mixture with water (you will need to stir it a bit).

Add one egg, 1/4 cup oil (I used avacado oil) and 1/4 cup sugar. Mix it up. It should come out to the 2-cup line, because the oats absorb lots of the liquid. The above picture is a bit deceptive. The measuring cup is indeed full.

In a mixing bowl combine

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Pour the wet mixture into the dry, and mix. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tins, and bake for twenty minutes.

Take the muffins out of the oven, and let them sit in their tin for ten minutes. Then remove the muffins to a rack to cool.

I had such a wonderful time playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and I imagine that I will always associate the experience with these muffins. I'm also planning to make them to share with my whole family at Thanksgiving, but I will need to double the recipe.

The muffins are not that sweet, so if you like sweeter muffins you can add a bit more sugar, or sprinkle some on the top before baking them. And I always like to use cane sugar (the kind with larger caramel-colored crystals) when I bake.

And if you don't have dried cranberries, whole cranberry sauce (half a can if you are making one recipe, and a whole can if you are doubling it) would be great. I made my original muffins with prepared sweetened cranberry sauce (thus eliminating the need, for me, to have more sugar than 1/4 cup in the recipe).

NB: If you really want to make a full tin of muffins, you can always add more cranberries and more oats. I think that the liquid ingredients can stay the same, though.

NB2: Or have a muffin with a piece of 70% dark chocolate! Fantastic!

Hooked on Sonics

A great pun, and a great article (with wonderful illustrations) over in the Public Domain Review.

Hooked on Sonics: Experimenting with Sound in 19th Century Popular Science

WTC, Einmal anders

Years (or maybe decades) ago I imported a bunch of CDs to my computer so I could load them onto an iPod and listen while I walked. At some point I must have imported them to a very old iPhone before iTunes became Apple Music, which is now "pay for play." I haven't become a subscriber to any music services because they don't organize music in a way that I can use it. Each movement of each piece, for example, is a "song," and each performer is an "artist." 

It works perfectly well for a lot of people, but, call me either old or fuddy-duddy, it doesn't work well enough for me to justify the monthly expense.

After poking around the Apple Music app on my phone in the Bach to see what I could play (somehow an automatic "composer" organizing system must have put all the Bach together), and having lost the piece I was listening to due to a fumble in my pocket, I accidentally came upon Sviatoslav Richter's recording of the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier. What a treat (I thought) to bring on today's walk.

After having temperatures in the 80s until yesterday's rain (the first rain in months), today was cold. I had a coat, a hat, and gloves on. The wind was strong, but it always managed to be at our back. The sky was blue, the leaves had suddenly turned yellow, and I was listening to a Bach fugue with new ears because I had developed enough as a pianist since the last time I listened to this recording to actually know the territory, landscape, and physicality of the fugue that Richter was playing (the C major Fugue from Book One).

But wait! The C major Fugue was followed by the second fugue, and then the third. I started to understand what was happening. I have never listened to the WTC as a series of fugues before. Our walk lasted through all the fugues of Book One, and then, informed by the alphabet, I guess, started on the preludes (beginning with the C major) while I was rolling the trash can to the "curb" (we don't have a sidewalk, so there is no curb--just the spot where the driveway, the front lawn, and the street meet.

In Praise of The Day

In case of rain I used sharpie and crayon on canvas.

UPDATE: It did rain, and the sign served beautifully. The rain even washed away a few stray pencil marks that I could not remove with an eraser.

There were 600 people of all ages demonstrating, and the majority of the cars driving by were waving flags, giving a "thumbs up," and honking to signify their approval.

It was gratifying to be part of this world-wide peaceful protest.

No Return: A Recording Made by Cellist Katja Zakotnik

I am happy to share wonderful news! The German cellist Katja Zakotnik has included a fantastic performance of my Sephardic Suite on her EP "No Return."

You can listen on Apple Music here, and on Spotify here.