This is not a joke!

Another instance of the "Mozart Effect" at work.

Yiddish Tango!

Learning by Watching and Listening

Now that my mind has started to calm down after an intense four days of listening, watching, playing, rehearsing, and talking about music with my new-found soul-mates at the viola d'amore congress, I can begin to process the experience.

The congress began for me with a rehearsal of the trio for recorder, viola d'amore, and viola by George Hunter, that began as soon as I arrived in Evanston, Illinois on Monday, and the first concert of the week began at 8:00 that evening. It was two hours of violin sonatas and triosonatas with viola d'amore expertly performed by the Trio Settecento. Part of the fascination of this concert was that, except for the Corelli Sonata, Opus 5, No. 6, everything on the program was new to me.

I had a rehearsal at 8:00 for the first daytime concert of the congress, which began at 9:15 the next morning. There were concerts and lectures (mostly concerts) running daily from 9:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a two hour break for lunch and rehearsals, and then another concert every night at 8:00. We're talking about 6 to 8 hours of viola d'amore music a day!

My father warned me that I would begin to tire of D major: the instrument is usually tuned with a low A on the bottom, a D above that, another A, a D-major or D-minor triad above that, and a final high D. D major was the favored key of the later 18th-century music, and D minor was often used during the earlier 18th century. Luckily many people played in baroque pitch, which is a half step lower than modern pitch, making a lot of the music fall into the sounding key of C-sharp major or minor, and there were a surprising number of pieces that used other tunings, including music from the 19th and century and not necessarily tonal music from 20th century (and 21st if you include mine--but I used the D-minor tuning). I managed to keep my total attention on the music and the playing for the entire congress: there were very few moments that I wasn't in full emotional and musical "vacuum mode."

There was a whole evening of Vivaldi and Graupner concertos with the Baroque Band, and members of the viola d'amore society from all over the world showed just how clever and flexible Vivaldi was as a composer for the viola d'amore. I was also thrilled with the many Graupner pieces I heard this week, especially his Concerto for Viola d'amore and Viola that shared this Vivaldi program.

Highlights from the 19th century included music by Markus Leo Goldis, and highlights from the 20th century included Sonatas by Paul Hindemith, and Irving Schlein, a Caprice by York Bowen, a 1980 Sonata "Balletto Solenne" by Gordon Tonson (who plays viola under the name of Maxwell Ward), a Serenade for flute, viola d'amore and strings by Richard Lane, some preludes for viola d'amore and harp by Henri Casadesus, a Sonata da chiesa with organ by Frank Martin, the Hunter Trio, a Sonatine for Viola d'amore and Harpsichord by Wolfgang Hofmann, and music by Carl Wunderle.

I returned home, and took out my "normal" viola to play a wedding yesterday (I hadn't practiced a stringed instrument since playing my Birthday Pieces on Tuesday morning). I was surprised that I could play with far more freedom and strength than ever before, and could even play better in tune. I found that I was far more aware of my connection to the other people in my quartet. The act of listening so carefully and intently to so much string music played by such excellent musicians did more for me and my playing than hours and hours of practicing. It also really stimulated my imagination.

I now have a slew of projects lined up to write for the viola d'amore, and feel terribly excited about the future, partly because there is just so much to learn about this instrument and its many musical possibilities.

Their world creeps into ours . . .

"We're all teen moms--and musicians."

"Everyone in this program?"

"The program . . . it's for teen moms."

"So I didn't get here on my own?"

"Of course you did. You're the world's greatest French horn player, and I'm Yo-Yo Ma."

Watch the clip here.

Birthday Pieces from the Viola d'amore Congress

I have been spending the past couple of days in Evanston, Illinois among viola d'amore players. We have three concerts a day, with workshops in between, and the concerts have been enlightening and thrilling. This recording came from this morning's concert. I'm playing viola d'amore, and Hsaio Ling Lin is playing piano. There will be more to come!

Amanda Maier Violin Sonata

It has finally been entered in the Petrucci Library!

Generation Eeyore

Like many people of my generation, I grew up around pessimists. It seems to me that my generation was simply filled with Eeyore parents (other people's parents seemed almost as pessimistic as mine seemed to be). There was so much wrong with everything in the larger world: drugs, hippies, racism, crime, communism, the Iron Curtain, Middle-Eastern terrorism (particularly the Iranian hostage crisis), the energy crisis, antisemitism, political corruption (particularly Watergate), and pollution.

While I was growing up I was very much aware of the phoniness that goes with "importance," so I never trusted people in power. I still don't, but now and then I make an exception. I have noticed (she mentions optimistically) that some of the people in power who have an idealistic world view (and are willing to work to make it real) tend to be a few years younger than I am.

I always thought that music could be a way to transcend all that was horrible in the world, and that if my musical intentions were "true," I could do something of value and, perhaps, make the world a better place, at least while the music was happening. (My family nickname when I was a child was "Pooh.")

I don't know if that kind of idealistic view of improving a corrupt world is practical (as in the Hirschmann sentence I quoted yesterday), but idealistic music making can make it possible for chunks of time to be pure and true. A few minutes of beauty and idealism can be more meaningful than a whole day of ugliness and doom.

Writing music is itself kind of like idealism in action: there is an ideal balance for a piece of music, there is a "right" organization of pitches and rhythms, and there is an ideal performance in a composer's inner ear. With a lot of skill and a certain amount of luck, it is possible for a composer to put together phrases of music that can saturate chunks of time with the feeling of idealism. With more luck, it might even be played by musicians (perhaps musicians the composer doesn't know personally) that share his or her idealism. And maybe it will allow a few minutes (or hours) sometime in the future a bit more idealistic for someone playing or hearing the music.

Nothing is more practical than idealism

I have a piece of paper in my viola case that has a quote from Ira Hirschmann that says, "Nothing is more practical than idealism." It comes from his memoir Obligato: Untold Tales from a Life with Music that I read years ago, and passed on to a either a friend or a family member (I can't for the life of me remember who). Perhaps it is about time to get myself a new/old copy because, once again, the practicality of idealism is being challenged in a big way.

Hirschmann tells the story of how classical music concert broadcasts first hit the radio waves. The story also appeared in The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1949-1950) on pages 683-684, which I will paraphrase:

During the 1920s, when Hirschmann was working in the advertising department at L. Bamberger & Company, the department store that hosted the newly-minted WOR radio station on its sixth floor (so that they could sell more radios), he got a idea to broadcast New York Philharmonic concerts directly from Carnegie Hall over the radio. The Philharmonic’s manger, Arthur Judson, agreed to a price of $15,000 to broadcast the Thursday evening concerts for the whole season, but when Hirschmann approached Felix Fuld, the co-owner of Bamberger's and WOR (and, along with Mr. Bamberger, was also a subscriber to the Philharmonic concerts) with the idea, he insisted that most American people did not want to hear symphony music. He went on to say that they didn’t know what it was.

When Hirschmann invited ten girls from the bookkeeping department of the store to come in to his office and asked them (right in front of Fuld) if they would listen to symphony music if it were played on the radio, every one said that she would. Mr. Fuld still thought that $15,000 was too much money to take out of the advertising budget, and that was that, until the next morning, when Hirschmann got a call from Mrs. Felix Fuld who said that she would contribute the money as long as nobody knew where it came from. She said, “Men have no imagination” before hanging up the phone.

Hirschman added at the end of the article, “If I am violating a confidence of Mrs. Fuld's, who ten years ago passed away, I may be forgiven on the grounds of adding a historical footnote to a pivotal point in the musical culture of our time.”

Bloggery ≠ Vanity

Kyle Gann's deeply honest post and its comments (one is mine, which I will not reproduce here because it would be kind of vain to do so) in today's installment of PostClassic is well worth reading.

It brings up a lot of important stuff about the basic "why" of blogging.

UPDATE: I think that Kyle's subsequent post, Success is Just Another Form of Failure, is required reading for all musicians.

Sing it, Sister

Anne Midgette just noticed that people in her city (and the other east coast cities in her neighborhood) enjoy making music themselves. People have been doing it consistently in other parts of the country for a good long time. In places where there isn't a lot of live "classical" music to be had, grown-up people who care about music make it themselves.

Many of the people who join choruses for fun are people who sang in a chorus in elementary school, middle school, and high school. Many of the people who play instruments for pleasure now are people who had orchestra and band programs in their schools. With the rise of the new musical "systemae" that are enhancing some urban public school systems, there is bound to be a great upsurge in participatory classical music making in the next wave of urban adults (at least those in Los Angeles and in Baltimore), but with the disasters in state budgets, music programs are being cut (or severely reduced) in a large number of no-so-urban public schools. There is bound to be even more of a decline in participatory classical music in rural areas (where the "praise band" is becoming the gold standard of participatory music making).

Let's hope that by the time those musically-enhanced east-coast children grow up to be musically-enhanced (and hopefully well-educated) adults, they might be able to convince school systems in rural parts of the country that music making is a vital part of life, and that the benefits of well-guided music making early in life last for a lifetime. Gee. It might even generate a few more jobs for the many highly-qualified musicians that have to find work in other fields.

It is the "teach a man (or woman) to fish" story in musical action. It does make a difference.

What's in a Name: Music to the Nth Degree

I find it interesting that before the coining of the term atonality, the word tonal was not a word that was used to describe Western music from the Middle Ages until the first decades of the 20th century. The term "classical," when referring to music, is very broad. It's relative neo-form is just as broad, or even broader, considering the amount of water that has gone under the bridge since it was coined as a term.

Neoclassicism is a term that tends to refer, at least at this point and in a musical context, to works that take their inspiration from pieces in the "canon." Now, because of all of the previously-unknown composers who have come to light in this era of musical information sharing (particularly the on-line music libraries here, here, and here), we see that the old "canon" is only a drop in a huge bucket of the excellent "canon-quality" music that has wafted through rooms, concert halls, and houses of worship all over the world for the past 500 or so years.

Many of the 20th and 21st century words in our collective musical vocabulary are really just names for techniques. Minimalism is a technique that incorporates a lot of repetitive ostinato, and serial writing organizes its pitches in sets. 12-tone music uses rules to organize a series of 12 pitches in a way that avoids repetition (the opposite of minimalism, perhaps), but it is also possible to write music using rigid sets with fewer than 12 pitches. We also have many different ways of constructing and describing harmony: tertian harmony is based on stacks of thirds, and quartal harmony is based on stacks of fourths. Atonality is simply the absence of tonality (see above), and, though it is incorporated in a great deal of music, we have finally gotten to the point where its organized 12-tone form is no longer the "rule" when it comes to writing new music. It is very strange that the ear can tell the difference between polytonality and atonality, but I suppose our natural urge to organize music tonally helps us identify the necessary patterns, even if we do so only subconsciously.

Thinking in general about the musical seas that contemporary composers swim in, with species of every ethnic and popular variety pulling us this way and that, with electronic possibilities that boggle the mind (including keyboards that can divide the octave into as many equal or unequal parts as anyone could want), and with instrumental virtuosity like we have never seen before, we probably need a less relative term than "neo-classicist" to describe the current new-music practices.

When people ask me what kind of music I write, my usual response is that I write "enharmonic music." I say that it is "enharmonic" because I often need to figure out whether the "black key" pitches are sharps or flats, and it sometimes drives me batty. Because the music that I write tends to move rather chromatically from tonal center to tonal center, the handy-dandy key signature doesn't capture that many pitches for very long. The term "enharmonic" pushed its way to the front of my brain this morning (while I was listening to Grieg), and appeared in large letters as "n-harmonic music."

Yup. That's what I write: n-harmonic music. It might be what you write too. Perhaps it should be written as n-harmonic music. I don't pretend to understand the n-related math, but I imagine that there are many composers who do.

WWBD: Bach G Major Prelude BWV 1007 for String Quartet

Adventures in arranging are always interesting when it comes to arrangements of music by J.S. Bach! Here are two possible solutions to quartet settings of the perennially-popular Prelude from the G major Suite.

You're the Cream in My Coffee

Never in a million years did I expect to see Silk PureAlmond in my rural Wal-Mart store. I am a long-time devotee of Silk Soymilk, and a passionate almond lover (still crazy about them after all these years), so it's no surprise that I liked what I found, but just how delicious it was in my iced coffee was a surprise. This almond milk is pure white, thick, and, unlike some of the other brands I have tried, not overly sweet.

It can't replace soymilk for me (there isn't much in the way of protein here, and there's nothing in the way of those necessary soy isoflavonoids), but what a thrill it is to drink it in iced coffee, or even straight.

Neo-Classicist Music Criticism

These are good words to live by:

A neoclassicist musical criticism might differ from modernism in several important ways. For one, the shibboleth of supreme originality would be discarded. The imprimatur of artistic validity in a new work would no longer be granted only on account of novelty. Musical culture would begin to be unafraid of music that is strongly connected to the past or to other contemporary works. Concerns about “plagiarism” and the shunning of the “derivative” would be muted. The music critic’s first criterion would not be, Is the work original? Instead, it would be, How beautiful and skilled is it? Where there is innovation in the work, the critic might ask, What good purpose does this innovation serve? Does it serve beauty, clarity, meaningfulness, or catharsis (the goals of classicism)? Or again, the critic might first ask, How is the message of this work made clear, while being beautifully rendered? The critic’s assessment of novelty would be distinctly secondary.

In this way, innovation would not come at all costs, and the highly skilled use of common materials would become acceptable and appropriately honored. Critics and audiences would not be taken aback by something that sounds similar to another new work—or even an old work. The real question would concern the meanings and possibilities involved and the skill of presentation. The old would be welcome as long as there is present within it a grain of the new. This new element might not at first seem very novel, but nonetheless might constitute the seed of things to come. It would be available to all as common material—something that could have meaning and be of use to other artists in a process of refining the art towards a common and beautiful and profoundly human purpose or goal.

From Webster Young's Can There Be Great Composers Anymore? from the Spring 2008 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.

Stranger things have happened

My life has been rather bucolic this summer, and my various projects are punctuated with some somewhat focused viola d'amore practice, in preparation for the viola d'amore congress that is being held in Evanston, IL two weeks from today.

Some music written for the viola works for viola d'amore, but most of it just doesn't. The sympathetic strings on the instrument (and there are seven of them that echo the seven strings: a bunch of As and Ds, and then a D triad--either major or minor--on the top) enhance some pieces, but they clash terribly with others.

Just for fun I decided to see if the Sonata for Viola and Piano I wrote in 2003 would work for the viola d'amore. I was stunned. It actually lies better (and sounds better) on the viola d'amore than it does on the viola! The odd thing is that I wrote this years before I even knew anything of the inns and outs of writing for the viola d'amore. I wrote it before I ever held one in my hands.

My Viola Sonata is published by Subito, and they kindly let me update the piece for Viola d'amore.