Remembering David Nadien

I first heard of David Nadien (March 12, 1926 - May 28, 2014) from Julius Baker, who held him as his living musical ideal. Due to the miracle of video recording, we can hear them both in this 1967 set of Rosenkavalier Waltzes, and remember how beautifully it is possible to play:



My father likes to tell the story of Leonard Bernstein asking David Nadien how it is he has such a gorgeous vibrato, to which Nadien responded, "fear."

Here's a great collection of David Nadien's recordings (with sample sound clips).

If music be the love of food, write on!

Michael and I had some tremendous meals while we were in New York and New Jersey last week. One was in an Italian restaurant called "Tony's" in Wayne, New Jersey where the chef (named Anton Testino) is one of the competitors on this season's television show "Hell's Kitchen." We went there while the show was on the television, but very few people were watching because the food was just so good. I had a risotto with scallops and figs.

There were more meals, all of them memorable, but the most spectacular one was at Cucharamama in Hoboken, New Jersey. I could call the chef, Maricel Presilla, a Renaissance woman, but with her background as a Medieval scholar, it might make more sense to connect her with everything spicy, interesting, creative, and sensual from the the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages.

Maricel is a good friend of Jim and Luanne Koper, our dinner companions, so we got to meet her.



After returning to Charleston I sat down at the piano to play some Beethoven, and all of a sudden I had a Cucharamama-inspired musical idea, thus ending my "sabbatical" from writing music.

Maricel's cookbook will be arriving in tomorrow's mail.

Debunking a few Myths About Brahms

Styra Avins sets the record straight about Johannes Brahms.

City Music/Country Music

Winter was hard, and the trees know that in order to survive another one like the long doozy we had they need to put out great numbers of seeds. Before we left for New York and New Jersey last Sunday the seeds on our Red Sunset Maple were dropping and spinning through the air, and now, a scant week after we left an almost late-wintery midwest, they have taken root.

We came back to intense birdsong: beautiful, lively, and constant. The birds are enjoying the bounty of the trees and singing to one another. The flowers have burst into bloom, and the air smells wonderful.

I imagine that there are birds in New York City, where we spent several days walking to and fro, but I didn't pay attention to them because I couldn't hear them with all the city noise. (I do enjoy the collage of city noises, and while in the city my attention is always drawn to things synthetic because around here we have little in the way of city glitter.) Sibelius once remarked about the birdsong of a country influencing the music that people write. I think that's true of all the sounds that surround us (right now the birds outside my window are being accompanied by the steady hum of a mower).

In a few minutes I'll be adding to the musical activity with some viola scales.

It's nice to be home.

Thinking like the new audience for concerts

Chip Michael has some excellent observations about present and future audiences for concerts.

Turn, Turn, Turn

I suppose that I have spent the last 15 years or so turning nearly everything I have experienced, in one way or another, into music. My journey into serious composing began, once I had amassed the tools to do so, as a kind of chain-writing backlog of everything I experienced musically since childhood. After exhausting my backlog, which took about five years, I would turn pretty much everything I learned into a new piece.

I have come to a point where nothing of value seems to be coming out. Every time I sit down to write these days it comes up as a vague rehash of something I have already written, and it makes me feel pretty lousy. So I have decided to take a kind of sabbatical. It's a learning sabbatical, where I allow myself to read poetry without thinking about how I would set it to music, read novels without thinking about turning them into operas, and playing great music without trying to figure out what makes it great and how I might possibly absorb some of its greatness.

It has been about three weeks since I have decided it is perfectly fine to enjoy the musical world as a player and as a spectator rather than as a maker, and I have already learned a great deal about music and about myself as a result. My daily (and still very much under tempo) encounter with Beethoven at the piano is now an encounter with the composer on an emotional level rather than an encounter that results in intimidation. (Once I have gone through all the Beethoven Sonatas, I'm going to go through the Haydn and Mozart Sonatas again with fresh ears.)

My pre-sabbatical output is 77 compositions published by Subito, and 64 compositions that I have in the IMSLP. There's one more that I'll be putting in at the end of July, after it's performed by our Summer Strings orchestra. That makes 142 compositions (some of them long, like my so-far-unperformed operas, and some of them very short). I'm proud of the body of work I have produced at this point (if you click on the above links, you can see it in all its pre-sabbatical glory), and I am really enjoying the unburdened feeling of not having to produce more right now.

There seems to be more room in my head these days. I even sound better and am more engaged when I play the violin and the viola.

I suppose I have approached the work of being a composer in a kind of backwards (or back woods) way. I know I don't do enough (if anything) with the "business" end of composition, like trying to impress upon people how important it is for them to perform the music I have written. I'm lousy at business. I don't befriend people who have clout in the current musical world because of what they can do for me. I don't toot much of a horn (writing posts here is the best I can do, folks), and I seem to give opinions (on line and in print) that are not really in keeping with what people want to hear.

It's odd to see the changing of the seasons on the musical on-line world. Perhaps 50 people might glance at this post over the next few weeks or months. A few years ago it would have been at least 200, and many of the people reading would respond to what I wrote, either through comments or through another blog post.

We college instructors complain about the lack of engagement we see in our students, but those of us who haven't been students for decades are guilty of the same lack of engagement with the bits of information that flash across our screens, quickly seen, and quickly forgotten.

I hate to engage superficially in any way, and am horrified when I find myself doing so. It is very easy to slip into the habit of superficiality when so much of our daily interactions are accomplished through light-emitting devices.

I wonder, once the internet starts to slow down, and those of us who do not have the means to pay for a ticket to the fast lane, if we might reconsider alternative ways of interacting.

Sheldon Harnick's Hidden Treasures

I rarely buy CDs because my cup runneth over (and my shelves as well) with recordings I get for review, but immediately after I heard this interview on Fresh Air with Sheldon Harnick (recorded on his 90th birthday, which happened to be April 30, 2014, the same day as my 55th) I went to The Musical Theater Project's website and ordered a copy.

The 2-CD set is loaded with demo recordings of many songs that didn't make it into the final versions of the many Broadway shows Harnick wrote with Jerry Bock, including a few pieces that didn't make it into their most famous collaboration, Fiddler on the Roof. Harnick, who is a fine singer as well as a brilliant lyricist, sings on most of the demo recordings (most often with Jerry Bock singing and playing the piano), but there are appearances by Charlotte Rae, Hugh Martin, Betty Garrett, Buster Davis, Claiborne Cary, Danny Meehan, Susan Watson, Buster Davis, Leigh Beery, William Tost, Brian D'arcy James, Audra McDonald, and Margery Gray, who is married to Sheldon Harnick.

[Sheldon Harnick and Margery Gray]

Much of the music comes from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, but there are recordings from the later 70s through 2013 here as well. I admire all of these "Hidden Treasures," and there are some I have grown to love deeply. "Precious Little" is from an adaptation of the film It's a Wonderful Life that Harnick wrote with Joe Raposo. The show never made it to Broadway because a typographical error in the contract made it impossible for the show to be produced in New York. "'Til the Bootlegger Comes" and "Where Do I Go From Here," (one of the best Broadway ballads I have ever heard) were written out of Fiorello, the first highly-successful show Harnick wrote with Jerry Bock, but they have new life here. Perhaps "Where Do I Go From Here" is just too strong a song for any environment other than a recital of great art songs.

The song I listen to daily (and have going through my head while I'm not listening to it) is a 1978 collaboration with Michel Legrand (who plays the piano on this recording), Harnick, and Margery Gray called "My Star." It was a song from a film project that was cancelled, but they recorded "My Star" anyway. I'm so grateful.

My favorite line from that song: "I dream of steam."

Sidebar Lives: A Rant

Sometime during the first decade of the 21st century a friend referred to her life outside of our town and her work as college professor as her "sidebar life." Now that the concept of the "sidebar" has pretty much withered away from the usual on-line experience (blogs and websites still have sidebars, but fewer and fewer people seem to pay attention to them).

Many people, including me at times, have double lives. We have the life that involves the people we interact with in person, whether at work, play, or at home. Then we have our virtual communities, which sometimes involve commerce. Then we have our communities of social media friends, who are not necessarily people we spend time talking with, even though we might live in the same town or occupy the same work space.

We seem to be bound to our various cultures by our devices, and our virtual cultures (or cultures of "stuff") have become so rarified that it seems there is very little in the way of actual (if I can even use the word "actual" to refer to something different from "virtual" at this point) culture that serves as a point of reference.

There are only a few elements of culture that seem to affect all the people in proximity to me, but except for the weather, which is always a surprise these days, they are hard to find.

There seems to be one thing that unifies everyone under the age of 40 and most people under the age of 80: cell phones. Cell phones (and computers, tablet and otherwise) seem to be the entry point for just about everything concerning culture.

At rehearsal breaks it seems that everybody under the age of 40 communes with their virtual world by way of a cell phone. There are sometimes people I would love to speak with, but I feel like I'm interrupting something when I invade someone's cellular space. The cell phone seems, in many ways, to push away possibly activity in the non virtual world. In some ways, partly due to social media (i.e. Facebook), we know too much about one another, so actual real-time personal talk can seem superfluous.

My college students no longer seem to recognize cultural references. Television used to be something that provided a great deal of cultural common ground, but that is no longer the case. I suppose that people who watch the same shows have a kind of community, but that community is more virtual than real. I even notice an ambivalence to cultural references. Perhaps my students are lost in a digital polyculture, and they don't have the ability to recognize landmarks on a "map." Then again, there is no map.

A few years ago I played Copland's "Hoedown" from Rodeo for a class. The students all seemed to be engaged, and one student even responded by enthusiastically saying, "Pork, the other white meat" because he recognized the music from a television commercial. I responded, "Beef, it's what's for dinner." Everyone laughed, and a good time was had by all.

Today I played Bonaparte's Retreat, and followed it by "Hoedown." Sure. The cultural context I gave them was the correct one, but I found it sad that nobody recognized it from a television commercial that was popular during their childhood. It is pathetic, in a way, that I am grasping at television commercials for cultural context. It's a new cultural low for me. Nobody recognized "Rhapsody in Blue" from its use in commercials either.

I used to feel that there was a divide between popular culture and non-popular culture (the cultural stuff that made "culture" an operative term). Now I just don't know. I stopped trying to keep up back in the 1990s. I don't know how anyone can keep up now. How are we supposed to teach our students to recognize something of value in this cultural quagmire? Maybe they can recognize value when it is explained to them during actual class time, but how can we expect students to remember how to recognize something of value when they don't even have the skills (or the desire) to read the virtual map?

Haydn's Pencil

[Photo by Robert Greenberg]

From Haydn's house on Kleine Steingasse in the Viennese suburb of Obere Windmūhl.

"Being" a Composer, and Birthday Piece #6

When I turned 50 I decided to celebrate by writing a "Birthday Piece" for viola d'amore and piano to mark every birthday to come. This year's Birthday Piece came a bit early, partly because I needed an escape from a self-imposed opera project that I have been struggling with on and off for more than ten years. I somehow got the idea in my head a couple of months ago that since I had ample time I was now capable of making the opera work, but my constant need to escape from working on it gives me a clear sign that it's time to go onto other things. I have, after all, already written three operas, and none of them has ever been performed.

Sometimes I wonder what it means to "be" a composer. Am I a composer when I'm not writing? Am I a lousy composer when someone politely doesn't respond to a work I have written for him or her (even a commissioned piece)? Money is an easy exchange, but human contact is not. Who is to judge the quality of a piece anyway? The people playing it? The audience? A critic? If I were to stop writing today, would I still be a composer?

I get great pleasure from making things, and that includes writing music when it comes from a deep creative place. That deep creative place used to be like a lake of musical experience. For years and years all I needed to do was "go" to it, and I every time I would draw up something unique. But things seem to have changed of late, and I fear that I have gotten everything from my figurative lake that is available to me. Every time I try something new these days it seems that it is a restatement of something that I have already written. Perhaps it's time to hang up my composing hat for a while and make other things, like hat bands.

This one matches the dress I made the other day.

The Education of the Senses

My friend Norman Spencer (who has told me over and over that music is not one of his areas of real knowledge) put this post on Facebook where he made reference to his fondness for the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. He included a picture of Linus (of Peanuts fame) sitting next to a radio on top of a caption that reads "Happiness is a Sad Song."

I think I've said before that I am intellectually a pessimist, but emotionally an optimist. People without a tolerance for ambiguity might find this to be a paradox, but in combination they result in a wistful melancholy, like music in a minor key. However much I am cheered, even exhilarated, by Mozart's Singspiele, I am comforted by the Allegretto movement of Beethoven's Seventh, the greatest piece of music ever written, in my opinion, because, because like me, it is both major and minor.

Here's my response:

Some of the most uplifting and exhilarating pieces of music happen to be in the minor mode. And that fine line between the emotions can be crisscrossed constantly and imperceptibly by a composer who has the sensitivity to understand how complex the human animal is. I don't really understand why people (who do not prioritize music) divide it between major and minor, reflecting merely happy and sad states of being. We have areas of our tongues that taste bitter, sweet, salty, and sour (not to mention umami), and most of us see a wide swash of the color spectrum in three dimensions. We feel a wide range of temperatures and textures with our skin, and we experience smells that allow us to recall times and places from our most deeply buried memories. Composing musicians and performing musicians offer us those kinds of experiences in organized sound (though too many people hear only happy and sad, loud and soft, or fast and slow). A good performance of the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th (not to mention the whole Symphony) can stimulate and challenge the senses of people hearing it partly because it stimulates and challenges the senses of the people playing it. It is one of the handful of pieces in the orchestral repertoire that instantly allows the people playing it and the people hearing it to become one.

Then I started thinking about my own sense of sense in relation to my recent gastronomic expansion and the pleasure that it has given me to eat from the whole "repertoire," not just from the foods that grow in the ground.

The first piece of meat I ate in a decade was a piece of chicken I had at our daughter's wedding two weeks ago. Surprisingly the chicken itself had little in the way of flavor for me, but it gave me energy and kept me full. Meal by subsequent meal during these last two weeks I started to notice complicated and pleasurable flavors that were in my food. It was not instant. It was kind of like a negative developing, or like a distant radio signal becoming more clear. Now that I am eating meat regularly I have a much more acute sense of the various flavors in the plant foods that accompany it. I simply get more pleasure from the various (and they are now really various) flavors that are in my food. I wonder if eliminating a whole category of food (or two categories if you include dairy) eventually began to dull my sense of taste.

I wonder if people who have only had the experience of listening to music through a recorded filter suffer unknowingly from the same kind of passive sensory deprivation that I had during my decade of eating only plant-based foods. I wonder if people who only listen to music played in a few keys (you know, C major, G major, D major, and A major and their relative minors) don't happen to notice that there are all sorts of harmonic possibilities beyond three sharps. And young brass players who live in the keys of F, B-flat, E-flat, and A-flat might not realize the possibilities available in the worlds of sharp keys. Pianists get used to the tempered tuning of their instrument, and they may not really notice that when they hear vocal music or string music that the musicians are often using a natural (or pure) scale when they are singing or playing.

One of the maxims in Stevens Hewitt's Oboe Method reads, "The only education is the education of the senses." This makes total sense (no pun intended) to me now. As human beings we are totally pleasure driven. If it were not for pleasure, we would not bother to procreate. If it were not for pleasure we would not form communities. We make music for pleasure and for the pleasure of others. We cook food for pleasure and for the pleasure of others. The experience of pleasure is what allows us to recognize it when we encounter it again. Teaching people to recognize the pleasures available in the world around them is a genuinely worthwhile activity, but, like anything worthwhile, it sometimes takes time and courage for relative novices to hear (and taste and feel) for themselves.

Here are some more of Hewitt's maxims (for your pleasure).

Some Very Special Community Recognition

There's something special about getting recognition for what I do in the place where I live. Here's the article in the local paper about it.

Revisiting Old Things

I used to sew. I started doing it in earnest when Michael and I moved to Illinois in 1985. I found it very relaxing. I sewed dresses using Laura Ashley patterns, and I sewed maternity clothes. I sewed curtains for our house. I sewed things for Michael (he still uses one of the three robes I made for him), and I sewed baby and toddler clothes for our children.

My sewing machine broke around the time I started playing violin, and I forgot about sewing. The red-checkered kitchen curtains I made back in 1992 became so faded that we decided to replace them (with new red-checkered curtains, of course) about a month ago, and on a whim I decided to spend $100 on a new sewing machine so that I could hem them.

Then I found the fabric sites that the internet has to offer, and I bought several yards of lawn fabric (two different prints) and a dress pattern.

Yesterday I cut, and today I sewed. I couldn't finish what I was making because I misjudged the amount of fabric I needed, and I had to order more.

I used to think that arranging music (music written by someone else) was a lot like sewing. If you have great material to work with, your main charge is not to do anything that lessens the quality of the material. Writing music from scratch is a totally different experience.

While I was sewing I was thinking about my opera in progress (I have an introduction and about 6 minutes of music so far), and I was thinking about how much sewing is not like writing music. Composing is more like spinning the thread, weaving it, designing the pattern, and dying it.

Sewing from a pattern is satisfying because all you really have to do is follow the directions exactly in order to have your project come out properly. If you take extra care and correct mistakes, it can even come out looking nice.

Now that I am back in the "sewing" of things, I realize how difficult composing actually is.

I also ate beef stew for the first time in ten years this evening.

My life is a-jumble with returning sensations.

Orfeo by Richard Powers

I am not generally a reader of best-selling fiction, but I devoured Orfeo and savored every bit. It is a novel about music: the protagonist is a composer of avant-garde music who came of age in the 1960s. The novel is set in places I know very well (including Urbana, Illinois and Brookline, Massachusetts), and Powers describes them succinctly and accurately; even the small places and fleeting moments (including stops en route from Urbana, Illinois to St. Louis along I-70). He also describes places he hasn't been with great artistry, like the camp where Messiaen wrote and performed the Quartet for the End of Time and the first performance of HPSCHD at the Assembly Hall on the U of I campus on May 16, 1969.

Powers and I are contemporaries, and though his protagonist (in current time) is a decade and a half older than we are, he is able to vividly and realistically capture a sense of the cultural and technological "now" in contrast with the progressive "then" of the 1960s. He is able to switch between decades deftly and seamlessly. The reader instantly knows where and when time changes before the transitional sentence is finished. It's kind of like a tempo change or key change in a piece of music.

Powers has a deep understanding of music, and a deep understanding of musicians. Better than Thomas Mann, perhaps. And he uses a device for dialogue that I have never seen before (and didn't really notice until I was about halfway through the book). Dialogue is printed in italics, and the speaker is never identified. He writes so clearly that speaker doesn't need to be identified.

I bought an electronic copy which I read on the flight to our daughter's wedding in Los Angeles. One of the first things I did in town was go to a bookstore and buy a hard copy to give to my (musician/scientist) father. I'm excited to discuss it with him.

Franz Liszt was a Freemason!

From James Huneker's 1911 book about Franz Liszt:

On the 31st of July last one of the greatest artists and men departed at Bayreuth for the eternal east, who had proved himself a worthy member of our brotherhood by his deeds through his whole eventful life. It is Brother Franz Liszt, on whose grave we deposit an acacia branch. Millions of florins Franz Liszt had earned on his triumphal career—for others. His art, his time, his life, were given to those who claimed it. Thus he journeyed, a living embodiment of the St. Simonism to which he once belonged, through his earthly pilgrimage. Brother Franz Liszt was admitted into the brotherhood in the year 1844, at the lodge 'Unity' ('Zur Einigkeit'), in Frankfort-on-the-Main, by George Kloss, with the composer, W. Ch. Speyer as witness, and in the presence of Felix von Lichnowsky. He was promoted to the second degree[390] in a lodge at Berlin, and elected master in 1870, as member of the lodge 'Zur Einigkeit,' in Budapest. Since 1845 he was also honorary member of the L. Modestia cum Libertate at Zurich. If there ever was a Freemason in favour with Pope Pius IX it was Franz Liszt, created abbé in 1865 in Rome.