A Letter from Milton Babbitt

Bernard Zaslav received this letter from Milton Babbitt on April 16, 2005, a few months after the release of the Zaslav Duo’s recording of Babbitt’s 1950 “Composition for Viola and Piano” on the Music and Arts label (CD 1151). Zaslav sent a copy of the recording to the composer, and got this response.

Dear Bernie,

Can you forgive unforgivable delay in responding to your communication, and--more--the wonderful recording?

My only excuse is that these past eight years have not been the best of times. Sylvia, after being crippled by PMR, had three strokes which have left her bedridden in an “extended care facility.” We were driven from our New York apartment by landlords and lawyers on the basis that we did not spend enough time there (of course, since Sylvia was in the “hospital”).

In any event, I am in Princeton, and go to Juilliard on Monday, returning to Princeton on Tuesday, and trying to live in our little faculty house with all of our New York possessions crowding the place and in storage. My dear daughter spends most of her time here (rather than in her home in Mass.) driving me around. I see Sylvia every morning and try to get some work done: Jimmy Levine did the work that the Boston Symphony commissioned in January, but I don’t get around much any more, which merely intensifies my sense of nostalgia when I receive a gift such as your performance, for which a million thanks.

Love to both of you from both of us,

Milton

Notes:

Sylvia Babbitt died on October 28, 2005.
The work Babbitt referred to was the premiere of the 2004 “Concerti for Orchestra” in January, 2005.

Babbitt Composition for Viola and Piano

Milton Babbitt wrote this in 1950, lived until the age of 94, and died yesterday. The Zaslav Duo (Bernard Zaslav, viola and Naomi Zaslav, piano) recorded this in the 1970s.

Update: Here's a recording of the first part of Babbitt's Third Quartet, commissioned in 1970 and performed by the Fine Arts Quartet (with Bernard Zaslav playing viola). Here's the second part, and the third part.

Soft Viola

(Thanks to Michael for the link.)
Oldenburg and van Bruggen have other whimsical sculptures too.

And here's Oldenburg's Soft Viola Island

which, like the Soft Viola sculpture, is at the Whitney Museum.

As nifty as these may be, my cellist friend Martha pointed out that they are not actually violas, because the instruments in both works of art have end pins.

Observation

I came across a very enlightening passage while reading Geerat J. Vermeij's The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civiliztion. Vermeij, who is blind, learns everything he knows about the natural world (and he knows a lot) through his sense of touch, sound, smell, and taste. He took part in a program for blind children who were interested in science, and hoped he could share his childhood love of shells with these children (from pages 38-39).

Each child was handed a shell, which I then asked him or her to describe. After this first encounter, we could begin to prove the many oddities of form and ornamentation that these shells displayed so well. I hoped to duplicate for these children the wonder I literally felt when, and the age of ten, I first encountered shells from Florida and other exotic places. . . .

I did not expect the children to notice the kinds of detail I look for, but I hoped they would take the time to inspect these objects carefully, given that few if any of the children would have handled anything like them previously. Each specimen expressed a wealth of tactile features, which cannot be grasped with a cursory inspection. Yet a cursory examination is all that these shells elicited. Adult observers in the room told me that it took about one second for a child to pick up the shell, examine it, and put it down without further touching. A bit of probing confirmed that these children had reached adolescence without having acquired the habit of automatic exploration through the sense of touch. Did this reflect a pervasive lack of curiosity? Had no teacher, parent, or sibling shown these children the pleasures and rewards of close tactile observation? Is there an unspoken assumption that gaining experience through touch comes naturally, especially to a person without sight? I came away from this experience convinced that observation, like reading and writing, is a skill that must be nurtured and honed before it becomes an unconscious habit of mind.

Vermeij's observation can apply to just about anything. I suppose the whole process of teaching is sharing tools of observation with students. People with a perfectly functional set of five senses can be lacking in the most important sense of all: the sense of how to use them in order to learn something about the world (or about music, or about themselves). Perhaps we are not born with natural curiosity. Perhaps it needs to be taught (and learned) in order for us to grow into fully aware human beings.

There's a saying in the Stevens Hewitt oboe method that reads, "the only education is the education of the feelings." I would add the education of the senses to this saying.

An Exercise in Bad Taste

It is interesting to follow the controversy surrounding a piece Lang Lang chose to play at the recent White House state dinner. I can't help but noticing that the name of the composer of the popular (and populist) song he played isn't mentioned in any of the articles about the performance. The composer's name is not listed in the IMDB listing for its source (and the source of the controversy), the film Shang gan ling.

My choice for Chinese State Dinner entertainment would be something by Ma Sicong, perhaps the Song of Nostalgia.

There is a lot that China has to offer musically, if you look in the right places.

Bernard Herrmann's Concerto Macabre

Last night Michael and I watched Hangover Square. The real star of this film (which is a film about music) is the music, particularly this exquisite Piano Concerto.

Here's one spectacular scene:



and the trailer:



And you can actually watch the whole movie for free (and right now) on Hulu! The final scene (from about 01:06) is simply mind blowing. There is one moment when the music, which is clearly in the foreground, begins to illustrate the action, thus keeping one foot in the foreground and another in the background.

The Future of Telephony as Seen from 1962

You can see the whole thing at Paleofuture.

"Classical Music" vs. "Popular Music" in the Library

While I was in the stacks of a public library yesterday (in a larger city than my city), I noticed that the music section was divided between what would be termed "classical music," and a mishmash of what would be loosely termed "non-classical music." Books about jazz were interspersed with books about blues and books about non-western (another broad classification, I know) music. The "non-classical" section was about five times larger than the "classical" section. This is a public library, and it follows the Dewey Decimal System, which organizes a library's collection of books about music (as opposed to actual printed music) under the numbers 780 and 781.


The Library of Congress organizes its books about music this way:



In the 19th century, when these systems were created (Dewey and LOC ), nobody had any idea that books about "popular music" (ML 3469-3541), "dance music" (ML 3400-3465), and "folk, national or ethnic music" (ML 3544-3776) or Dewey's "kinds of music" (781.5), and "traditions of music" (781.6), would outnumber books about the rest of the field.

And what's up with Dewey's 780.8? What does he mean by "kinds of persons?"

Six Degrees of Musical Separation

Here's a new "six degrees" game I invented that can work horizontally or it can reach back in time. The one rule is that you need to have played with or studied with the person who is one degree from you, and the rest of the people need to have played with or studied with the person to either side of their names on the list.

Here's a sample:

Me
My father (Burton Fine)
Rudolf Serkin
Pablo Casals
Richard Strauss
Hans von Bülow
Johannes Brahms
Clara Schumann

Nu?

The Snows of Yesteryear

Michael made this drawing of me out in the snow with my viola on my back several winters ago. The snows seem to have returned. But now I find myself asking the question, "Where are the snowplows of yesteryear?"

The Dream We All Share

Range of Emotions and the Musical Discourse

I got rather angry while listening to the "To the Best of our Knowledge" podcast called Why Do We Love Sad Songs, because I found the explanations of the "experts" ranged between the superficial monochromatic and the downright wrong.

Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't consider the proper way to describe the Barber Adagio as "sad?" Hearing or playing it stimulates a range of emotions in me. Some of those emotions have names, and some that do not. I find hearing it played well allows me to have great range of emotional reactions. There are times during any given reading of it when I feel exhilarated, and times when the music makes me feel tense, there are times when I feel sure-footed, and times when the music makes me question. I respond to the various timbers and use of tessitura by having different physical reactions. I respond to the lengths of the phrases, and the way they ebb and flow, and I feel differently--a whole new "cocktail" of differently--each time I hear it.

I fear that musical discussions like the ones in the aforementioned podcast are leading the basic stuff of musical discourse down the path of one dimensionality. Music is something far greater than happy or sad, and the elements in music that tug on our various emotional strings are far more sophisticated than describing the function of a descending major or a minor third in root position, and being done with it. The major = happy and minor = sad argument falls terribly short when discussing a piece of music by an emotionally off the chart composer like Beethoven. I lose patience when adults talk about major thirds being happy and minor ones being sad (and nobody ever mentions their emotionally-confusing inversions).

Children can often be quite creative and open when they describe their feelings, particularly when someone is willing to listen. People seem to be born with a rainbow of emotions, and ways of expressing them, but too many people lose them along with their baby teeth. Consider this cartoon that our son drew when he was nine or ten (Gran is a cartoon character that Ben used to draw back when he was a member of the Junior Cartoonists Society):


Fortunately he has been able to retain (and even expand) his emotional vocabulary into adulthood.

One of the instructor evaluation questions that students at my community college are asked to answer each semester is whether the instructor is able to simplify complicated material. I believe that what we seek from music is not the simple, but the complex, and we are often drawn to the emotional complexity in music that seems simple on the surface. Consider the monophonic Dies Irae. I could write volumes about this piece, if I only had the skill and vocabulary to do so. It reaches beyond the part of me that needs to represent thoughts in language. I can tell you why I like it, or why it's important, or what the words mean, or the tradition of incorporating it into to other works, but I can't really articulate the way it makes me feel. I can tell you one thing though, I wouldn't restrict my vocabulary to words like "happy" and "sad."

Perhaps one of the indications of what people like to call the "decline of classical music" is the sound-bite nature of using simple concepts to describe something that, in its most successful form, defies the use of (or need for) words. Culturally we are rather immature when it comes to talking about complicated feelings. Some of us have a difficult time when we encounter music that is too "intense" and requires too much of our attention, particularly if it is vocal music.

I believe that music that stimulates and draws upon deep emotional experiences will always be with us (though it might not be as easy to find in the future), and I believe that there will always be people who desire emotional musical substance in their lives, even if it happens rather late in adulthood.

When things get rough we need to remember that we do what we do for those people (many who will remain completely unknown to us) as well as for our own emotional health.

Ginastera concerto for Harp and Kitchen Tools

There's something kind of "right" about this video made by harpist Elizabeth Jaxon:

Top Ten, Once Again

I noticed some heated (and not entirely civil) discussion over at the Iron Tongue of Midnight concerning the over-analyzed (and pretty much limited to chapters 13 through 20 of the first edition (1960) of Grout) classical top ten list that the New York Times tossed into the virtual fishtank that is the musical blogosphere. Late last night I put a comment on one of Lisa's older posts, and I thought I'd repeat it here with some links and annotations.

Only a few top ten lists makes sense at all. Perhaps they can be divided into a few categories. Here's my top ten list of musical top ten lists (off the top of my head).

1. One that is funny and has nothing to do with anything meaningful (David Letterman-style)

2. One that has its participants limited to the numbers one through ten. Even with that kind of restriction, we would have serious arguments about which number is most important. I know that one is the loneliest. To prove the usefulness of the above item 1, David Letterman took this challenge on many years ago.

3. One where you really have to dig to get all ten slots filled, like the top ten ways you can slice a sandwich.

4. One that involves a control and a narrow span of time, like the top ten opera composers born before 1685.

5. One that lists the top ten arguments for Wagner being included on a list of top ten composers and not Verdi.

6. One that lists the top ten arguments for Verdi being included on a list of top ten composers and not Wagner.

7. The top ten reasons that Hildegard is considered an important composer.

8. The top ten songs from the Carmina Burana. (This will take a great deal of time to make, but the research does afford a great deal of pleasure.)

9. The top ten most prolific and least important composers of all time.

10. The top ten reasons for Tommasini to have written his article in the first place.

Grandma's Lye Soap

Last summer while Michael and I went on vacation in New York, a nice lady in a very nice hardware store sold us some Grandma's Lye Soap. She said she used it for washing her face (and she had very nice skin). We bought two cakes, and have been using it daily on our hands and faces ever since. The other day Michael put a cake of it in the kitchen, and, on a lark, I decided to use it to try to clean the grimy outside of our stainless steel tea kettle. The grime came off instantly (with the help of a scouring pad), and the thing looks like new.

I tried it on what I thought was a permanent stain on my yellow ceramic teapot, and the stain is now gone. Nothing else has ever worked. So what does this have to do with music, aside from keeping me from practicing (but you should see my kitchen!)? It turns out that Johnny Standley and Art Thorsen wrote a song about Grandma's Lye Soap. I know from practical experience that the secret is not in the scrubbing: it's in the soap!

Do you remember Grandma's Lye Soap,
Good for everything in the home,
And the secret was in the scrubbing,
It wouldn't suds, and wouldn't foam,

Oh, let us sing right out (sing out!)
For Grandma's Lye Soap,
Sing it out, all over the place!
For pots and pans, and dirty dishes,
And for your hands,
And for your face!

Little Therman, and Brother Herman,
Had an aversion to washing their ears...
Grandma scrubbed them with her lye soap,
And they haven't heard a word in years!

Oh, let us sing right out (sing out!)
For Grandma's Lye Soap,
Sing it out, all over the place!
For pots and pans, and dirty dishes,
And for your hands,
And for your face!

Mrs. O'Malley, out in the valley,
Suffered from ulcers, I understand,
She swallowed a cake of Grandma's Lye Soap,
Has the cleanest ulcers in the land!

Oh, let us sing right out (sing out!)
For Grandma's Lye Soap,
Sing it out, all over the place!
For pots and pans, and dirty dishes,
And for your hands,
And for your face!

Alternate Verse:

Mrs. O'Malley
Down in the valley
had a hound, I understand.
It swallowed a cake
Of Grandma's lye soap.
Now it's the cleanest hound in all the land

Oh, let us sing right out (sing out!)
For Grandma's Lye Soap,
Sing it out, all over the place!
For pots and pans, and dirty dishes,
And for your hands,
And for your face!

We're off to the hardware store to buy more of this magic soap.