Different Ways of Experiencing the World

I was shocked at how little Daniel Tammet and I have in common regarding our perceptions of the world. I wonder if he would be equally clueless concerning the way my mind works, if I were to try to explain it.



I was talking with a friend the other day about pitch. She claims not to have perfect pitch, but she can tell where any note is on her instrument, and insists that as long as you can name a note, you can commit that note to memory and always be able to tell what it is. She was surprised when I told her that no matter how hard I try (and I have tried, believe me: my three brothers all have perfect pitch), I haven't been able to develop pitch recognition. I often imagine pieces in my mind in the right key, but if I were asked to name that particular key (and if I didn't already know the name of the key), I wouldn't be able to do it with any kind of certainty.

My father once assured me that even though I don't have perfect pitch, I do have other things.

Passages, Phrases, and Gestures

While listening to Dianne Dwyer Modestini discuss the process of restoring a painting made by Leonardo da Vinci on an eposide of The Story, I smiled to myself when I heard her use the term "passage" to refer to specific areas in the painting known as the Salvator Mundi. She also likened the process of restoration (which, in the case of this painting took years) to being an editor.

In music we often refer to motives as "gestures," and, when I work with advanced students, I can make analogies to punctuation. I love the idea of considering "passages" in paintings (which are actually things that do not move) and "passages" on music, which are things that do move, but paint the equivalent to disappearing line drawings in time and aural space.

Health Care for Composers in Days Gone By

In celebration of the Supreme Court's ruling that the Affordable Care Act is indeed constitutional, John Clare of ClassicallyHip made an amusing post with a "top ten" list of composers who, if they were alive today, would have benefited from having affordable health care.

I could name a few more composers who would have benefited, like Schubert and Mozart. It is indeed a wonder that anyone made it through to adulthood when you think of the way medicine worked before the advent of germ theory. It's a wonder that anyone made it through childhood! Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl had five older siblings who died in infancy.

Charles Hazelwood's Paraorchestra

I find this fascinating, and thought I'd share it here.

If I were in New York this evening . . .

. . . I'd go to this Manhattan Chamber Orchestra concert of music by Seymour Barab, Richard Auldon Clark, Eric Ewazen, and Michael Schelle.

It's not just because two of the people who wrote the music that's being played (and sung) are friends of mine, but my two friends happen to be fantastic composers. I do know that the program will include Seymour Barab's Songs of Perfect Propriety, settings of texts by Dorothy Parker.

If you go to the concert, please use the comments section to let me (and other Musical Assumptions readers) know what you thought. We just can't trust the regular press to make it to (and write about) all the worthwhile concerts going on in a big city like New York.

UPDATE! Allan Kozinn from the New York Times WAS there!

Here's his review.

This Method Book is For the Birds!

Literally!



[The Bird Fancyer's Delight, or Choice Observations And Directions Concerning the Teaching of all sorts of Singing Birds after the Flagelet and Flute [recorder] when rightly made as to Size and tone, with Lessons properly Compos'd within the Compass and faculty of each Bird, viz. for the Canary-Bird, Linnet, Bull-Finch, Wood-Lark, Black-Bird, Throustill [thrush], Nightingale and Starling. The whole fairly Engraven and Carefully Corrected]




[’Tis still in memory, the old manner of Playing on the Flute, which was by the way of Dots, a memorial of which remains in the Gamut for that Instrument to this time, but it being so impracticable and never to be attain’d to at sight, that the use of the Instrument was almost lost, till introduced by Gamut rules, which has not only brought it much in vogue, but the Performers on it are as ready at sight as on any other Instrument, ’tis not doubted but the like Improvement will be made on the Flaggelet by this Method, which Instrument is not only delightful, but also profitable, particularly to Bird Fanciers, it having been often known that Birds after being taught by the Flagellet has been sold for great value, all Lessons or Airs that are made for the Flute may now be play’d on the Flagellet, which must of Consequence be very grateful to all Lovers of the Instrument, the improvement of which is owning to the Ingenious Mr. Hill, who has made several Incomparable Peices [sic] for the Flagellet, and is an excellent performer on it, and to encourage the Lovers of it, he is willing to instruct in this new Method, any that is desirous to learn.]

Here is a link John Walsh's 1715 book that offer's the ingenious Mr. Hill's method.

It actually turns out that if you follow the pun (which I always do), and consider that the word "flageolette" (or "little flag" for the diamond shape that replaces the note-head in fingered harmonics), these little tunes make great fingered harmonic exercises for violinists and violists.

Music Market Ramble

A couple of years ago I wrote a note to an ensemble that recorded some rather rare music by a little-known composer I happen to like a great deal (and anyone reading this blog could probably guess the identity of that composer). I wrote my message to the ensemble through the rather large company that made their CD, which was the only way I could reach the musicians who played this music. My message included a statement about the quality of this composer, and suggested that the members of the ensemble might consider scanning the manuscripts they played from into the Petrucci Library so that other people could study it and play this music. I mentioned how difficult it is to interest publishers in music by little-known composers, no matter how good their music happens to be.

(Nearly three years have passed since that e-mail message, and these pieces are still not available for other musicians to play.)

The recording company executive told me that he passed my message onto a person who would forward it to the ensemble, and included the phrase "This music deserves definitely more recognition; we hope that many customers encourage us to advance soon."

What strikes me as terribly sad about that statement is the simple fact that the furthering (and preserving) of worthwhile musical endeavors is so often driven by consumer demand. It is one thing when the consumer in question is a music ensemble, and that ensemble is looking for interesting and unusual music to play. Most musicians are happy to pay for nice editions of music they want to play. The "economy" in that kind of situation is one that would, under the best of circumstances, move forward. In the case of newly-discovered music by people who have been dead for a while, a publisher makes money (or makes back an initial investment of time and engraving skill) by selling the music, and musicians can make money by playing the music in concerts (and the same people can play the same piece of music for many different audiences). Perhaps there is also money involved in paying people who staff and promote the various ensembles and concert venues. There is also a little money involved when academic musicians include musical analysis in the books and articles they write, and money involved when applied teachers use published music to teach. Most of all, the music itself can be played many different ways by many different people, and a lot of people can get a lot of pleasure from playing and listening to it. At any rate, the egg-white economic theory is at play: money (or anything) is worth more when it remains in circulation.

It is another thing when the consumer in question is a person buying a recording. A person may love the music on the recording, and it may be extremely meaningful for his or her life, but there is no way a record company can measure how many times someone plays a recording. S/he only buys it once, and the only thing that can be measured is how many recordings are sold. Many recording companies require a certain amount of investment on the part of the people playing on the recording, and the production of a recording does involve some economic movement, but once the music is on a disc and the disc is in a box, that is the end of the line. A record company can make the investment to promote a recording, but the resulting numbers really reflect more on how well the recording is marketed than how worthwhile the music on the CD happens to be.

The idea of a wonderful piece of music ending its life as a single out-of-print recording is terribly sad.

Anton Ferdinand Titz in the Petrucci Library

I have spent the past two days in a heightened state of musical-archaeological bliss. A very kind person scanned the manuscript of an otherwise unknown (not even mentioned in Grove) Duo for Violin and Cello by Anton Ferdinand Titz into the Petrucci Library. I'm not sure if the piece has ever been played before (even in Titz's lifetime) because the parts were filled with errors that would have made it unplayable from the manuscript. What a treat it was to correct them, and what a thrill it is to hear this wonderful whimsical piece.

Look at the cover page. Titz lettered it himself. Look at the backwards capital F!



You can hear a synthesized audio file here. Here's a link to the PDF file.

Previous Titz-related posts:

Doesn't This Make You Curious?
The Dedicatee of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets

Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet and Beethoven's Quartet Opus 59, No. 3

Here's a nice way to see (and hear) how Beethoven used Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, K. 465, as a model for his Opus 59 No. 3 Quartet. I love the domestic settings of these two videos. This is, in my mind, the kind of setting where chamber music should be played, and I really like the way both of these quartets (the Italian Quartetto Lyra for the Mozart and the American Jupiter Quartet for the Beethoven) play these first movements.





You can go back and forth between the two windows, which is a real luxury. You can also follow the score for the Mozart and the score for the Beethoven, and compare them.

I kind of like running them simultaneously and tuning in and out of one or the other. And it is even fun to listen to them playing at the same time.

Help With Six-Eight Time

Sometimes people new to string playing have a difficult time understanding the physicality of six-eight time. I know that it took me a long time to figure it out, and a long time to figure HOW to figure it out.

I made a nifty scale sheet that you can access here that might help people with violin, viola, and cello students who are faced with the challenges associated with that particular meter.

Old School?

David Usui, a young film maker in New York, sent me a link to a short film he made featuring Gregory Singer, the conductor of the Manhattan Symphonie. Watching the film, I saw a relatively young man (around my age) playing the first movement of the Bach G-minor Sonata, riding his bike around New York City, and doing a nice job conducting the overture to Die Meistersinger in Carnegie Hall. Usui suggested that Singer was one of a breed of "old-school NYers" who are "quickly vanishing."

Old school? You should meet my New York friends!

Vanishing? Nobody is going anywhere. Musicians continue to be musicians even when there isn't a "market" for music. Ask any "old school" musician (from my old school, in particular), if they would stop doing what they are doing (i.e. being a musician) if the money wasn't there to pay for it.

Usui also added a line saying that classical music is vanishing. I don't think so.

Since Usui was bold enough (being a new reader, and not knowing me personally) to suggest that I might want to put a link to his film on this blog, I will be bold enough to take issue with it, at least a bit.

The camera work and voice over during the Bach Sonata is quite good, though I found myself paying more attention to the music than to what he was saying. The biking around Manhattan in the center of the street gave me the willies, and I would rather have heard Singer elaborate on something other than about riding his bike. He did some nice things in the Bach. I would have enjoyed hearing him talk about that, perhaps. Or his violin shop (which he calls "the office"), or his impressive legacy, or even having a twin sister like Lori Singer (who I remember from Juilliard before she became famous, or should I say Fame-ous).

It would have been a good idea to identify the orchestra he conducts (I had to look it up). The players look rather young. At first I thought that he might have been conducting a youth orchestra.

Tea, Coffee, and Music in England

As I was listening to Steven Johnson's "Is the 'Eureka' Moment a Myth" segment on a TED talk today, I heard him make a connection between the first coffee and tea houses in England and the Enlightenment. He mentioned that because the water was lousy, most people drank beer and wine during the day, and spirits during the evening. This implies that the whole British population was in a state of inebriation until the prospect of drinking a stimulant like coffee or tea came into play.

[I thought of the word "teetotaler," which seems to have first been used in the 19th century, and seems also to have a somewhat blurry etymology. Perhaps the expression also comes from the idea that you could drink tea, wine, beer, and spirits, or you could drink just tea. A total tea drinker. But this is neither here or there.]

What caught my fancy was the idea that a lot of English music from before the mid 17th century (and everywhere else where the water was unsafe to drink, for that matter), could have written in the state of light inebriation. Consider the difference between music of a beer-drinking culture (Germany) and the wine-drinking cultures of Italy and France. Consider the languid English music of John Dowland and the tantalizing and intoxicating music of Holborne.

Then consider the clear-headed wisdom of the East, where people had been drinking tea for dynasties.

The first coffee house opened in England in 1652. Twelve years later there were more than 3,000 coffee houses in England, and coffee and tea houses were opening all over continental Europe. The smart people of the day (particularly those who pioneered enlightenment thought) hung out in coffee houses, and stimulated their discussions with what they were drinking.

These were the days in England of Henry Purcell, a prolific composer who might have been in a position (historically) to write hilarious songs about the culture of drinking alcohol because he could look at life with the clear mind someone who had the option of drinking a cup of tea once in a while.



[At this point you might want to exit this post and go off and listen to more of Purcell's works. I'm going off to make a nice pot of tea, and maybe I'll get down to doing some actual work.]

The Ivory Fox and the Hahn!

HH: "Do you still play?"
IG: "Do you still breathe?"

HH: "Do you still perform?"
IG: "I never perform."

Ivry Gitlis and Hilary Hahn talk about music and life in a bar in Amsterdam. These are two violinists from what seem like two radically different worlds, and Gitlis is a gem of a human being. Listening in is like being a fly on the wall.

Rosenkavalier in Another Context

I was very pleased to read Matthew Guerrieri's interesting musings about Richard Strauss this morning, and when I sat down to read Alexander King's May This House Be Safe From Tigers, I had every intention of writing a blog post quoting King's half chapter about Rose O'Neill, the inventor of the Kewpie doll (which all Kewpie doll collectors should read--it's in Chapter 12, and there are copies of the out-of-print book still at large), and the way the editorial staff of the New Yorker edited a story he wrote about her to smithereens, but then I found myself in Chapter 13, and had to share this story first.

When he was a child in Vienna, Alexander King's family doctor suggested the theater as a way to satisfy little Alexander's lust for life and to keep him quiet.

"But, Doctor," said my poor mother, "he just wants to go everywhere and to see everything. He goes to bed at two-thirty and he gets up every morning at six. What can we do with him?"

"Take him to a theater or a concert, maybe, but nothing that will upset his nervous system. I strictly forbid it," he said.

So my parents got some seats for the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier, which was to be conducted by Richard Strauss in person at the Hofoper.*

[Footnote: Please, please don't bother writing to me that this date is wrong. I know all about the official statistics on this subject, but when I did a piece on Rosenkavalier for Vanity Fair in 1931 I verified with Richard Strauss himself that, although the opera had its premiere in 1911, a preview of it was given in honor of the King in 1908.]

Since this opening was scheduled for the evening, I'm afraid my folks weren't exactly fulfilling the doctor's orders; but luckily they hadn't the vaguest idea how to raise a child, and, besides, I would certainly have fought like a savage if they had suggested taking me to a mere matinee.

Then a really bad piece of luck hit me: I got a terrible earache--got it around two o'clock in the afternoon of the very day when we were supposed to go to the theater. It was no ordinary pain either. It was as if somebody had inserted a good-sized corkscrew into my eardrum and was trying to pull the left side of my brain along with it. But I just had to keep my trap shut about it or else there certainly wasn't going to be any show that evening. I don't know how I finally managed to make it. All I remember is that I took about half a dozen aspirins before we finally started out, and that my mother had to dress me twice, because I perspired all through my clothes the first time. Of course my parents wanted to stay home, but I gave them such a desperate sales spiel that at last I managed to change their minds. That evening, obviously, cost us all a great deal even before the joy of it was properly under way. When we were finally seated in the opera house, my pain, luckily, left me, or it well may be that I just couldn't spare any further attention to it, considering all that was going on around me.

Once, years late, I saw a bum movie about the Congress of Vienna, with Lilian Harvey, and believe me, it was almost exactly like that. Everybody was dolled up in fancy dress with at least one red sash across their frilled shirt fronts; loaded down with swords and epaulettes and decorations of all sorts; and bowing and heel-clicking and hand-kissing enough to dazzle the most blasé of worldlings. I was embedded in such perfumes, such hair oils, such pomades and hairdos on all sides that I thought I was suddenly going to rise right up to the crystal chandelier with the wonderful odor and ecstasy of it all. It also seemed to me that the men who were pouterpigeoning it all around me were even more startlingly decked out than the women. The women showed off a lot of bouncy bosoms and bare shoulders and stuff, that's true, but the men were the ones who really had the most daring explosions of gold and silver trimmings all over their duds. It was sheer heaven.

There was one depressing not in this glittering assembly, however: me, and my folks. We looked like a nest full of molting dormice, and I must say I have never before realized that my old man was such a complete failure. He didn't even wear a silk rosettes in his buttonhole, or have a feathered cockade in his hatband, or nothin'. He was a real false note, and no mistake about it.

The minute the show started, the pain in my ear woke up again. It throbbed like crazy and I suddenly felt some tears running down the side of my nose. But it was dark and nobody noticed anything. I can't tell you how much I dreaded the coming of intermission. On previous occasions these used to be my favorite times in the theater, because, in Vienna, people stowed away enormous wads of grub during every entr'acte and this was always my big chance to wolf a lot of contraband stuff that I was never allowed to eat at home. I think I often liked to attend a lot of plays especially for the exciting food interludes that were offered at least twice every evening.

But not this time. I nearly died during that intermission.

Later I must have fallen into a kind of protective stupor or something, because I can't remember much about it. All I know is that when the opera was finally over and Strauss was up on the stage holding hands with the bowing principals, I suddenly slipped from my seat and passed out cold.

I woke up in the office of Dr. Brieger, a friend of my father's who lived right near the opera, and that gold man diagnosed my condition as a middle-ear inflammation.

"It is fiendishly painful," he said, " and I don't see how the child was able to stand it for all those hours."

"He just didn't want to miss the excitement tonight," said my tearful mother.

"Well, we'll have to lance it immediately," said Dr. Brieger. "I'm sure he'll be a good little trouper about it."

He was wrong, of course. I screamed bloody hell when the time came, and when my poor parents finally carried me home through the noisy, festive streets I was jus a collapsed bundle of whimpering disaster.

Twenty years later, on the very day, I was back in the Vienna Opera House to hear Dear Rosenkavalier, with Richard Strauss conducting again. He had gotten quite a lot older in the meantime and so he was directing the orchestra sitting down in an armchair. Well, I was there, all the way from New York, to help him celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his work, and my wife was there too, but my children, better brought up than I had been, were both properly asleep at our hotel.

It was a wonderful if somewhat less picturesque evening than the last one, and when we finally got back to the Bristol my wife and I were still harmonizing some of the enchanting melodies from the evening's production. when we arrived at our room, however, we found that we had nothing to sing about, because my older boy, age eight, was sitting up in his bed and tearfully complaining about a bad earache.

In the middle of the night we had to rouse the hotel physician, who examined him with Teutonic thoroughness and finally told us that the kid was suffering from an acute inflammation of the middle ear.

Fortunately I'm not particularly superstitious, so I never attached any special significane to this silly coincidence. It was just a drag, that's all.

While I was busy writing these last few lines about Rosenkavalier, my own ear suddenly started to hurt again after an interval of fifty years. So I knocked off for a while, applied a heating pad and even took a nap for a couple of hours.

But the pain continued.

Dr. Merton Hoskins, a neighbor of mine here in Framingham, just left me, after having given me a stiff dose of penicillin.

And what do I deduce from all these goings-on? What meaningful conclusion have I drawn from this astonishing, almost symphonically repetitive emergence of the earache them in juxtaposition to the Rosenkavalier leitmotiv?

Only this. That the knowing monitors of The New Yorker magazine may never dare to offer their sophisticated clientele any stories that form neat little patterns or have vulgar O. Henry finishes, but life, much more carelessly edited, just obviously doesn't give a good goddam.

[Margie King Barab holds the copyright for the Alexander King portions of this post.]

Why am I Not Surprised?

I just read that the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was unable to pick a winner for its public and partially online concerto competition. Maybe the reason is similar to why some major orchestras have trouble filling first chair positions. People who find themselves in the position to judge other musicians always act subjectively. Too much "personality" (for better or for worse) often doesn't make it past the preliminary stage, but not enough "personality" is (or not hearing anything special) is a big reason for deciding not to hire anyone.

I imagine that when it comes to hiring soloists, administrators tend to be concerned with extra-artistic matters, like how well a potential soloist will promote ticket sales, and how much promotional money they would have to spend to make everything work out financially for their organization.

It is sad that as the "business" of music has come to embrace the values of the greater business world at large, people tend to make decisions that are musically counterintuitive.

The judges could have voted to have Odin Rathnam in the semi-finals, but he, as a result of the video he sent in for the competition, has gotten several offers to appear as a soloist elsewhere. To think, Pittsburgh could have gotten him for cheap. Why is it that some people don't pay attention to the obvious when it comes to evaluating musicians.