More Meetings with Remarkable Men

When I was around 11 I went to a summer camp near Tanglewood. It was a "fine arts" camp, so we sometimes went on trips to see and hear performances. One concert we went to was some kind of new music concert at Tanglewood. I was pretty young at the time and had little frame of reference, so I can't remember what was on the program. I do remember that it was in the Theatre building, and I was sitting with my friend Donna Zeif, who lived in New York and was very worldly.

At intermission Donna got very excited and pointed across the Theater at two men who were standing up. She told me that the two men were Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. We ran through the crowd, and she approached Leonard Bernstein and asked him for his autograph. (I knew it was Leonard Bernstein because she addressed him as "Mr. Bernstein," and I imagine she knew who he was from the Young People's Concerts in New York.) He held out his hand like a policeman stopping traffic and said "No, no, not tonight." I said something to him (I know not what), and he laughed. He might have even patted me on the head.

Technorati tags: Classical Music, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Tanglewood

Concert Reviews

One of the most interesting assignments (for me) connected with the music appreciation classes I teach is for students to go to a concert and write about it. I ask them to write about various elements of the performance, including an evaluation of the audience, the performance space, and their own feelings about going to the concert. Because I live in a relatively small university town, and because most of the students wait until the week before the paper is due to actually go to a concert, I tend to get multiple reviews of the same concerts.

What strikes me as interesting is how different these reviews are. Everybody brings his or her own experience to a performance, and everyone's experience, even those people who have to be there for the same reason, adds something to the concert as a whole. Some people are quite critical, some people are impressed, and everyone is honest. None of these students have ever read a review of a classical concert written by a professional reviewer, so nobody has to worry about following any kind of "literary" or "journalistic" model. All they know when they are writing these papers is that I will read them, and that if they do a good job on the assignment, they will get a good grade.

Most of these students found that writing about a concert was an easy way to write a paper (their "research" takes about an hour, and they only have to write about what they see and hear for themselves). For me these papers act like a window to let me look inside the minds and ears of my students, and by extension look into the minds of what I hope will be part of the musical audience in the future. Reading these papers reminds me that what we are doing as musicians and teachers is life enhancing.

Most of my students (there are 60 of them) had never been to a concert before. I think that half of them might go to another concert at some time in the future. A handful of them might even become actual music lovers. That makes me happy.

Related Post: Being part of an audience for student recitals

Technorati tags: classical music, music appreciation, concert reviews, teaching

Germanic Orchestral Traditions

Here is a fascinating article by William Osborne about the traditions and history of orchestral music in Europe, particularly in Vienna. His discussion does call upon the darker aspects of the musical world, particularly music in Vienna during the Nazi era and the horrible history of sexism in the Vienna Philharmonic and other orchestras in the German-speaking part of Europe.

Having lived in Vienna myself (it was around 25 years ago), and having known members of the Vienna Philharmonic, and even one of its conductors, what Osborne writes in his article rings all too true.

And They All Sang

I was very excited to find Studs Terkel's new book And They All Sang. It does not surprise me that he is a serious music lover, but it does surprise me that he has been sitting on a bunch of interviews with musicians for years (some of them are from the 1950s!). The book is an eclectic mix of performing musicians (lots of opera singers), impresarios, folk musicians, jazz musicians, American composers, and musicians who don't really fit in any kind of category.

Here is a choice quotation from guitarist Andres Segovia from an interview done in 1978:

"By traveling so much, I have felt the roundness of the earth under my feet."

My Own Private Radio

I used to work at a college radio station. I was called the classical music drector, and I was responsible for building a classical record (I started working there in 1986) and CD library, teaching students how to pronounce the names of composers and performers, making programs, and spending a bunch of time on the air myself.

It happened that the university held a special workshop with Karl Haas, back in the days when the university in the town where I live invited classical musicians and people connected with the classical music world to campus.

I was a novice at radio, and I spent most of my time learning on the job. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I was asked to do a radio interview with Karl Haas. I had been interviewed a few times, but I never actually conducted an interview before. I found Mr. Haas charming, and we got along just fine. When I confessed to him that I had never done an interview before, he told me that it was best not to talk too much before we got on the air or the interview would suffer. Once we were were in the studio and the microphone went on, Karl Haas changed from a medium baritone to a bass baritone. I believe we talked very frankly about music, but he was in total control of the interview. I learned everything I needed to know about classical radio from those thirty minutes.

Now that I am older and maybe a little bit wiser, I would love to be able to interview him again, but he is no longer alive, and my radio days ended when the university radio station abandoned its classical music programming.

Meetings with Remarkable Men

During the summer when I first read The Catcher in the Rye I used to write daily letters to my friend Sarah Wank. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and I spent much of my summer hanging around with the composition students who were at Tanglewood. I lived around there in the summer, and I used to particularly enjoy the new music concerts that were part of the Fromm Festival. The composers were creative, energetic, social, and interesting, and they were the kind of people I wanted to be when I grew up. That summer Peter Maxwell Davies was the composer in residence, and a lot of the composition fellows were British. They used to hang out by the "cafeteria" area where there were large tables on which they could work on their large scores. The composers seemed to like me because I was always interested in what they were working on.

Well, one day I was holding a letter for my friend Sarah, and Oliver Knussen, who was a student at the time, caught a glimpse of it and started laughing. I asked him what he was laughing about, and he mentioned that my friend's name was Wank. I had known Sarah since I was six years old, and her name never caused anyone to laugh before. When I asked him what "Wank" meant, his answer was that it meant "autoerotic." I was rather innocent, and I still didn't get it. Just to let Sarah, who was equally innocent, know, I did write the "definition" of the word on the outside of the envelope before putting it into the mailbox.

Playing With the Greatest of Ease

Many members of this new generation of prominent young string players (people in their twenties, mostly) seem to have benefited from excellent teachers who have managed to nearly eliminate any sort of tension or difficulty in their playing. They have techniques that are completely flexible and they seem to be in complete control of applying intricate musical nuances at any time. They are well versed in various kinds of "stylistic" playing (baroque style, tango style, bluegrass style, jazz style), and they know the ins and outs of playing chamber music because they have had oodles of opportunities to play at string camps and music festivals. They have had the benefits of reading magazines like "Strings," have had college courses to help alleviate performance anxiety, and have the world at their fingertips via cell phones and the internet. Some of them have even taken courses in the "business of music," and many of them are able to play on reasonably-priced instruments made by contemporary makers.

The road ahead for these players is by all means not rosy because of the demographics of the audience for classical music, but this generation seems to have a "leg up" on my generation of musicians who were in their twenties around twenty years ago.

Much of the repertoire for strings--particularly music from the later classical period and the romantic period, involves music written by composers who infused their music with some sort of personal emotional struggle. Those that didn't (like Mendelssohn) sought to depict the emotional struggle of others, or simply the emotional struggle in the music he respected.

Here is my question: When music that, at its essence, is "about" emotional struggle and ultimate existential questions becomes easy to play because of technical advances in the instrumental approach, does the substance suffer?

Technorati tags: classical music, musical performance

Early Music

I came of musical age in the 1970s, near the beginning of the "original instruments" movement, before the term "historically-informed performance" was used to describe the kind of playing that came from applying information found in historical music treatises to modern-day playing of music written before the era of recorded music.

My first early music experience happened on New Year's Eve in 1971 or so when I heard Franz Bruggen play the recorder on a television program. I believe he played some Van Eyck pieces (it was late—around midnight, and I was young—11 or 12, so I don't know for sure). What I do know for sure is that it was at that moment that I wanted to play some kind of flute. I thought that they were pretty much all alike, so I went for the modern one that was in my house when my mother could no longer play it because of her arthritis.

My next encounter with early music came when I discovered a New York Pro Musica recording of Monteverdi madrigals from the 1950s in my parents' record collection (actually it was part of the collection that they never played, so I just co-opted the recording). Then came a recording by the same ensemble made in the 1970s of the first printed collections of music printed by Petrucci. I discovered Josquin Des Pres. It was recommended to me by my violinist neighbor Jane Starkman, who told me that she was going to Holland to work with Franz Bruggen. Of course I bought the recording immediately.

When I got to Juilliard in 1976 the basic attitude of the students there was that people who devoted their time to learning to play "period instruments" were people who were otherwise hopeless on modern instruments. Not wanting to be hopeless, I stayed away from touching anything resembling a baroque instrument, but did spend a lot of time playing my modern flute with harpsichordists and thinking about Monteverdi and Josquin.

My last year at Juilliard I finally got the chance to hear Franz Bruggen play a concert. After hearing him play I was convinced that I needed to learn to play the recorder. I believed that instrument was the key to what I wanted to do musically as a flutist. I got to talk with Bruggen back stage for a few minutes about the possibility of studying with him. Later I was told that the "early music" scene in Holland, where Bruggen lived and taught, was a rather sexually open "scene." This intimidated and scared me, so I set my musical future compass on the possibility of learning to play baroque music in one of the other European countries. I was interested in learning about the music, not the "lifestyle."

When I got to Europe I found myself in the lucky position of getting a teaching job, and the main part of the job was to teach recorder. I had to teach myself the instrument in a hurry, which was a total pleasure. I still wanted to find out the "secret" of the baroque style, so I moved to Vienna and studied with a very fine recorder teacher named Hans Maria Kneihs. To my surprise what I learned from Hans was basic musicianship. I learned how to use the various attributes of the recorder and the tongue to accomplish certain musical objectives, but Hans's main concerns had to do with the basic musical concepts of playing in tune, in rhythm, and making musical sense out of the phrases in front of him. I'm sure that there was scholarship involved, but there were no stylistic "gimmicks."

It was at a master class with Hans and his students that I discovered the baroque flute. Somebody had one. I tried to play it, and it sounded horrible. When I returned to Boston I was able to buy one that was easy to play, and I set out to teach myself to play by using exercises by Frederick the Great (I know now that they were written for Frederick by Quantz) and the baroque music in the flute repertoire. Then I heard that there was an excellent baroque flutist in Boston named Chris Krueger, so I went to him for lessons. I learned the same stuff from Chris that I learned from Hans: Basic musicianship.

Now I know that the style of a piece of music is something imbedded in that piece. I also know that outside "rules" applied to music in the wrong way (like using French ornamentation in a piece of German music) is pretty distasteful. I have learned to read treatises with a sense of the motivation of the writer, and my sense is that Quantz (who wrote the mother of all flute methods) was trying his best to get Frederick to play tastefully. Likewise with Leopold Mozart when he wrote about vibrato. He didn't want string players to imitate singers who used a tremolo type vibrato. People read this "lack of vibrato" clause as a stylistic affect that can be applied to make "early music" sound "authentic." A gimmick. A trick. I personally think that a natural vibrato is a lovely thing.

Most of what I have learned about playing "early music" comes from playing baroque music on good copies of the instruments it was written for. Anyone who wants to learn to play in an appropriate baroque style would do well to buy or borrow an appropriate instrument and learn to play it from scratch and always apply the rules of good musicianship.

Technorati tags: classical music, early music, performance practice

Music Competitions

I tend to think of music as the opposite of a competitive sport, but it seems that the major "measure" of musical accomplishment is how musicians fare in competition. Competitions are acceptable for things that you can measure, like how fast someone can run, swim, or bike, or how high someone can jump, but accomplishment in music goes so much deeper than the superficial. Unfortunately it is the superficial elements that get judged in a competition: how cleanly someone plays, how well in tune, how flawlessly. Flawlessness seems to be the measure of musical accomplishment for even the kindest and most musical of judges. It is my experience that when flawlessness is the goal, the chance for true musical expression to enter a given performance is slim.

"Classical" musicians make up a very small percentage of the population. I think it is insane that we have to compete with one another in order to get some kind of recognition or have some kind of career as performers. I have a "no competition" clause in my personal approach to music making. I have no desire to be, or play, or write better than anyone else, but I have a deep desire to play well, to have contact with like-minded musicians, and to bring people together with music.

Young people need to have chances to perform without being judged. Young people need to have the opportunity to reach and enrich the people who are listening to them. They need to learn that music is something that unites us all. They need to learn that an honest and expressive performance of a piece accomplishes much more than winning a prize. That should be the "goal" of all musicians.

Technorati tags: classical music, music competitions

It doesn't get any better than this

I just returned from Boise, Idaho after listening to a concert played by Jen Drake and the Darkwood Consort. Last year they commissioned me to write a piece for viola, bass clarinet and strings for their ensemble, and it seems that my devotion to writing pieces based on Hans Christian Andersen stories and the Danish-loving nature of their ensemble (not to mention their bass clarinetist) was a perfect fit, and their performance of my setting of "The Ugly Duckling" was really spectacular. They also performed another setting of an Andersen story that I wrote for viola, bass clarinet, piano, and narrator called "The Happy Family" about the last surviving members of a family of snails (yes, escargot) that lived in a burdock forest. Jen's husband Chad was the narrator (he made me cry), and Karlin Coolidge played the piano on "The Happy Family" and the flute on the array of Danish treat music that balanced out the program.

The whole experience was wonderful, and I was particularly blown away by Jen's tremendous energy, her ability to connect with her audience, her ability to be enchanting both as a person and as a player. She prepared an ensemble of high school string players who sounded like professionals.

Playing major and even minor viola repertoire in big cities is wonderful, but my hat goes off (and my heart goes out) to people like Jen Drake and Aage Nielsen (the bass clarinetist) who can create a whole new repertoire for their instruments, and do it in a city far away from the major cultural centers of the country for an audience of people who understand and appreciate precisely how special the whole thing is, and knows just how lucky they are.

Technorati tags: classical music, Boise, music in Idaho

Why do people play concerts?

Last night I played my first (first ever) violin recital. I have played viola recitals, but my pianist friend and I thought it would be fun to explore the violin repertoire.

It is a lot of work to play a recital, and the benefits that come from the process of practicing, rehearsing, publicizing, and performing are completely intangible. Everything vanishes into thin air as soon as you finish playing. A recording captures only the surface of the experience, and with it most of the mistakes.

I can't speak for everyone, but most musicians worry before performing (at least before playing a solo or chamber music concert). We worry about playing the right notes at the right time. We worry about making a good sound. We worry about physical comfort on stage. We hope that we are not getting sick. We think about what we eat and when we eat it. We worry about our instruments. We all double check to make sure that we have our music. We worry about making stupid mistakes and getting lost. We practice and rehearse in order to be prepared for whatever happens.

Most musicians' main concerns are to play the music accurately, and to establish a connection with our performing partners and our audience. We try to bring out as much of the beauty in the music as possible. We know that the performance is a succesful one if we have a good time playing.

The best compliment I can get after a concert is "I liked (this or that) piece," or "I enjoyed myself." Playing music for people is all about enjoyment. It should be a time when everyone is focused on what they hear--both the performers and the audience.

Everyone who plays any concert has moments that go better than other moments. We all make mistakes. Some are blatant and some are veiled. Anybody who goes to a concert to "keep score" of the mistakes that the people playing the concert make would probably be happier at a sporting event or a game show.

Technorati tag: classical music

A Whole New Perspective

Yesterday I played the drum in a performance of Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony. It was a wonderful experience. I was volunteered for the position at the dress rehearsal when the trumpet player mentioned that he could not play trumpet and drum at the same time in the last movement.

I didn't know how to hold the sticks, or really what to do. I got to go on stage without holding an instrument (the drum sticks were with the drum), and I didn't get a chance to practice for either of the two performances. It was an exercise in luck for me, and it was a good one. Usually I play concerts, even orchestra concerts, knowing every note of my part intimately, and knowing how my instrument will respond to every note. All of a sudden I was at sea, and I knew that I had to swim. Thank goodness the part wasn't difficult.

I counted like crazy, and stood at attention during the movements I wasn't playing (I always wondered how percussionists did that so convincingly), and at the second concert I was proud of the way I played. My career as a percussionist in a professional chamber orchestra has ended, and I am very grateful for having had the experience.

Technorati tag: classical music

Joy of Practicing

I love to practice. Right now I'm practicing the violin with purpose because I'm playing a violin and piano recital in a few weeks (Mozart's birthday, January 27th to be exact) at the community college where I teach music appreciation. What I love most about practicing with purpose is the chance to take a mental and aural magnifying glass and examine every interval, every bow change, every shift, and every note for its resonance and relative comfort. It is in practicing when it is possible to really fix problems by rendering the awkward passages into passages of interest.

I love the feeling of "holding" long notes in my hands and letting them develop like a potter lets clay develop on the wheel. I love the way that working on a note-by-note basis can free up musical possibilities and allow new things to happen. I love the feeling that by working they way I am working, the concert might just have the possibility of being a real musical experience for everyone involved.

When I practice like this I feel like I am in the company of great violinists, both living and dead. It is not that I play like one, but I imagine that I am practicing like one. I believe that the better a musician is, the more attention s/he pays to the small details that concern moving through the music from one note to the next. I don't think that great musicians need to pay special attention to the technical details while they are performing because they worked on all the details during practice time. That kind of confidence allows musicians to express themselves and become one with the music and their performing partners.

Mozart's Thematic Catalog

The British Library has a fantastic feature called Turning the Pages where they have an interactive "exhibit" of Mozart's thematic catalog. It is just about the most exciting thing I have seen on the internet.

Technorati tag: classical music

Remembering Leo Wright

I spent the autumn of 1981 in Vienna, Austria. I left a teaching job I had in a little mountain town, and found myself enrolled as a student at the Hochschule studying recorder. I also developed an interest in jazz, and thought that it would be interesting to learn how to improvise like a jazz musician. A friend of mine recommended that I go and hear a jazz pianist named Fritz Pauer, so I went to a jazz club where he was playing (Vienna was awash with Jazz clubs in the early 1980s). I found myself sitting at a table with an American, so I introduced myself. After establishing the "wheres" of our American-ness, I told him that I was a flutist. He beamed. He was one too. When I told him that I studied with Julius Baker he was in awe. Julius Baker was his favorite flutist.

This man was Leo Wright. He was at this particular jazz club because his wife Elly Wright was singing there. She sang in a wonderful stylized English that completely masked the fact that she was from Vienna.

Leo was in his early 50s and was in the process of recovering from a stroke. He had difficulty moving his right hand, but he was determined to get his playing back. In his prime he was one of the most versatile saxophonists around, as well as an extremely agile flutist. He had a huge international career, playing with Dizzy Gillespie in the 1960s, and making wonderful recordings. By the end of the evening we agreed to trade lessons. I would try to teach him to play the flute like Julius Baker, and he would try to teach me to swing. In order to accomplish these tasks we spent a lot of time together.

He was kind of like a surrogate father to me in Vienna. He and Ellie taught me to be proud of my American-ness. Elly encouraged me to read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer which set me firmly on the path towards becoming a reader and loving literature.

I taught Leo to breathe by using his diaphragm. He never had adequate flute lessons (it seems that people didn't know much about the function of the diaphragm in playing the flute before the 1970s) and never learned to breathe properly. I believed that there would be a connection between this new (for him) type of breathing and his ability to relax and re-connect musically with his right hand. Somehow this connection worked. Eventually he was able to play again, and he made a big comeback several months after I left Vienna.

Leo used to bring me to jazz clubs all the time, and he used to encourage me to sit in with the musicians who were playing. Everyone respected Leo, so I guess they took a chance on me. I might have made a serious fool of myself, but Leo never let on that he thought so. I still learned a lot from Leo. As far as my learning to "swing" was concerned, I learned to appreciate good jazz playing, but I have never been able to play like a jazz musician myself.

I learned about dedication from Leo. Even when he was unable to use his right hand at all, Leo practiced long tones on the saxophone using only his left hand. I learned from Leo that the spirit of a musician is a very strong thing, and that a that the power of positive thinking is far stronger than I ever imagined it could be. I also learned about the particular strengths that I had myself.

Music is hanging around the air in Vienna. It always has been there, and it probably will always be there. Fritz Pauer told me that it has something to do with the water that flows in the underwater canals. Even in the silence of the night in Vienna, there is a certain musical rhythm in the air. Anyway, one day while I was walking in Vienna I started singing a tune. I figured it must have been something that I heard, but I couldn't place it. I sang it for Leo, and he had never heard it before either. He helped me harmonize it with jazz chords, and I let it rattle around in my brain for about 20 years until I turned it into a piece for string quartet that I called "Good-bye to Vienna." Of course I dedicated it to Leo, who is no longer alive in body, but will always be alive in spirit.