A String Orchestra Transcription of Beethoven's Charming Sonatine WoO 44a

Beethoven wrote this charming piece for mandolin and harpsichord in 1795 for Countess Josephine Clary, a mandolin-playing amateur singer (and a possible love interest). Two years later Clary married Kristian Krystof von Clam und Gallas, and she became the Countess of Clam-Gallas.

You can get the music for this most charming of pieces on this page of the IMSLP. You can also listen here.

This is from Beethoven's early years in Vienna, and for anyone wondering, WoO means "without opus." Here's a link to a list of the pieces that Beethoven wrote. All the pieces with WoO numbers are from before his Opus 1 or were not published during his lifetime.

Accidental Musical Detective Work

Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1762. The piece below (in the picture above) is from the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits," which is the part of the opera that most people recognize. Haydn's Opus 9 Quartets were published in 1769. I'm not a betting woman, but I would bet that Haydn attended that 1762 production, and a lovely four-measure-long musical gesture from the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" followed him out of the theater and found a home in the Adagio of this lovely, little-known quartet.

Why do I know this piece? I have the honor and privilege of having a long-term project that involves reading through all the Haydn quartets (in order) with a willing set of amateurs (and one former professional) at a local elder care facility where the former professional lives. I get to step out of my comfort zone and play first violin, which, in the case of this quartet, number 14 (of 83 Haydn quartets), was a real challenge.

We played Opus 9, No. 2 this evening, and it was a wonderful experience. So far it's everyone's favorite.

Practicing Long Tones

I have been spending time with Allesandro Casorti's The Techniques of Bowing, and found myself amused and amazed by this page:



44 minutes is a long time to spend practicing long tones. I imagine that you could spend the time meditatively counting breaths, or reading, or thinking about just about anything besides your bow stroke. So I began experimenting, and recorded the results in this video. Don't worry. It's short. But I could easily imagine doing this for 44 minutes.



The Casorti book, from 1909, is full of excellent bowing exercises. They are sort of mindless, but then again the idea of bowing exercises is not to engage the mind but to train the muscles of the fingers and hands to become efficient.

Looking at My Mother's Art This Mother's Day

I'm remembering my mother this Mother's Day by looking at and sharing her art. This painting from 1988 is of our daughter Rachel playing in the sand in Chicago's Bixler Playlot. The Bixler Playlot, a hot-spot for tots on 57th Street, is in the same general neighborhood where my mother grew up.



You can see more of her work here and here.

Violin and Viola Playing and the Crossed-Hand Illusion

In the process of learning to play our instruments, violinists and violists develop odd relationships between our visual and aural sensations. I remind my students that they are developing eyes that hear and ears that see. But it goes beyond that, because the mind's eye becomes intimately involved with the physical act of playing while our actual eyes are busy looking at music. When a violinist or violist looks at his or her left hand, the second finger is hard to see because it is physically obscured by the third finger. This obscuring of the more distant finger happens in our mind's eye as well, so we need to give a bit of extra thought to the act of moving the less-visible finger.

I was working on a double-stop passage with a student today, and she mentioned that she had a lot of trouble moving her second finger because it was so difficult to either see it or visualize it. This brought the "Crossed-Hand Illusion” to mind.



When the hands are crossed in this way, it is very difficult to move any given finger if someone points to it (without touching it). It certainly can be done, but it requires a great deal of additional thought. And it never becomes second nature. You can get better at it though, because with practice you get in the habit of thinking faster when it becomes necessary.

You can see a cute kid-made video demonstrating the crossed-hand illusion here.

After demonstrating the crossed-hand illusion to my student, I noticed that if I dropped my right hand and kept my left hand up in this crossed position, my left hand and arm were exactly in the position I use to hold my instrument.



When playing the violin or the viola the left arm crosses the midpoint of the body, creating the same possibility of finger confusion that happens when playing the cross-hand game. It is unique to violin and viola playing. It doesn't happen with other instrument!

I used to show this game to my beginning students all the time. I would use it as a way to explain that control of the fingers requires thought. I never once considered the direct physical connection with violin and viola position.

I found a bunch of articles about left and right brain stuff, and how crossing of the hands is cognitively beneficial. Here's a very technical one (that I don't pretend do understand). Here's an article about how important it is for brain integration to practice activities that cross the body's midline.

I played the crossed-hand game with my next student at the beginning of her lesson. I then asked her to drop her right hand, leaving her left hand "crossed." Her response was an immediate and decided "whoa!"

Pastiche!

I spend a lot of time playing consort music, so once in a while I like to express my (sometimes retro) musical ideas in the form of a viol consort. Through the magic of investable counterpoint, this pastiche has two viol-consort-like settings:



You can listen to the above version here.



You can listen to the five-viola version here.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

Birthday Piece Number 10

Today is my fifty-ninth birthday, so here is the tenth in a series of "birthday pieces" for viola d'amore and piano that I began when I turned fifty. My first "birthday piece" had fifty measures, and each year I add one more. This year's piece has fifty-nine measures for fifty-nine years. My viola d'amore is in the shop getting some repairs done, so this year's birthday piece can be played on either viola or viola d'amore. You can listen to a computer-generated recording here, and you can get the music on this page of the IMSLP.

You can find the rest of my birthday pieces in the IMSLP too.

Paul Hindemith clearly knew the music of Algernon Ashton, and so should you

The first example is from the second movement of Algernon Ashton's Viola Sonata, Opus 44, and the second example is from the second movement of Paul Hindemith's Viola Sonata, Opus 11, number 4.

The homage is palpable.

Ashton was born in Durham, England in 1859, and died in London in 1937. His 1888 Viola Sonata bears homage to several German composers (particularly Bach, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms). It was published by Simrock in Berlin, and would have certainly been available to Paul Hindemith, who was born in 1895 and was a violist.

Hindemith started work on his Opus 44 Sonata (his first viola sonata) in 1914, and played the first performance in Frankfurt in 1919.

Here's Ashton's New York Times obituary, (available to Times subscribers), a Wikipedia article about him, and an article by David Wright that mentions Ashton's hatred of originality and progress in music.

I think Ashton, had he knowledge of or interest in the music of the young Hindemith, would have been be pleased with what Hindemith did with his theme (if it was Ashton's to begin with).

Marie Jaëll A minor Sonata transcribed for viola

I didn't think I would be able engrave the massive and complicated piano part of the Jaëll A minor Sonata when I wrote my last post about my viola transcription of the piece. But since I couldn't imagine anyone else taking the initiative to do it, and I feel that it is a substantial addition to the repertoire, I spent the past month facing (and solving) some serious engraving difficulties while I patiently entered the 76-page piano part into Finale. I finished it today, and to celebrate I uploaded the sonata into the IMSLP. It was truly a labor of love. I believe that the piece will win the hearts of other violists as well as the pianists they play with. When we performed it in March that audience liked it too.



Marie Jaëll was born Marie Trautman in Alsace. She studied piano with Ignaz Moscheles, and then with Henri Hertz at the Paris Conservatory, where at sixteen she won a first prize for piano performance. She married the pianist Alfred Jaëll, and the couple set up a salon in Paris. Marie Jaëll was the first pianist to perform all of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in Paris. She wrote piano music, chamber music, vocal music, symphonic poems, concertos, and an opera, and studied composition with Cesar Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns. She was a close friend of Franz Liszt, and Saint-Säens considered her interpretations of Liszt’s music to be definitive. Jaëll wrote her A minor Cello Sonata in 1881, and it was published in Paris in 1886.

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP. You can learn more about Marie Jaëll here, and here.

"The Collar" for Bassoon and Narrator! What a great idea!

I just learned that an ensemble in India will be performing my setting of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Collar" with bassoon instead of with cello or viola.

What a great idea!

I just made an "official" transcription and uploaded it to this page of the IMSLP. You can also get it here.

In Search of "Lost" Violinists

I was talking with my father yesterday about article in Sunday's New York Times, (my father was around in New York during the 1960s, and never heard of Saul Lipshutz) and it brought to his mind a fellow student at Curtis, Michael Serber, who, according to my father was the very best violinist around Philadelphia during the 1940s, and, as far as he knew, didn't continue in music.

I thought it would be interesting to see what a few Google searches could find.

I found an obituary for Serber that revealed that he was concertmaster of the National Symphony, the American Ballet Theater, and the National Gallery Orchestra before going to medical school at Howard University. He was the Clinical Director of the Atascadero State Hospital in California, and "pioneered the systematic teaching of non-verbal components in assertive training and introduced the use of film and videotape feedback to teach assertiveness, tenderness and other social and sexual skills."

He died from Cancer at the age of 42.

Curtis has put listings from all of its concerts on line, and I was very excited to find this program for a concert in 1948:


[click for a larger view]

My father, who, like Serber, studied with Ivan Galamian, didn't pursue a career as a soloist. He went into science, and got a Ph.D. in chemistry. He continued to play professionally (i.e. he got paid to play) while he worked at NASA, and if he hadn't taken an audition for the Boston Symphony he might have been one of those "what ever happened to" violinists. But contingency intervened, and he is now known as one of the great violists. (Yes, I know that a viola joke could be inserted here. You can do it yourself.)

There are a great number of musicians who have chosen alternative careers to that of being a soloist (and a lot of them are working in orchestras, teaching, and practicing medicine, law, science, musicology, etc., and probably making a better and more stable living than a soloist) who could be profiled in meaningful ways by the New York Times.

But people like stories about redemption. I say "phooey" on redemption.

Leap Frog for Two Violas

After she saw my "La Grenouillère" viola sonata, my friend Robin Kearton commissioned me to write a duet for violas based on the game of leap frog.

You can hear me and Robin play "Leap Frog" here, and the music will be available soon on this page of the IMSLP.

What to believe

The other day a profile appeared in the New York Times about a boat builder named Saul Chandler who changed his name from Saul Lipshutz after he stopped playing the violin. Somehow he became known to Alex Vadukul, a writer in search of someone he felt had a human interest story that would resonate with readers (and it did). Vadukul put the words "redemption" and "lost prodigy" in the title, and illustrated the story with striking photographs. The words "excellent," "gift," and "genius" pop up all the time. Those are the words of Vadukul, who interprets Chandler's stories with the eye and ear of a writer who really wants to believe the stories he is told.

Michael and I both questioned how much of Chandler's story is true.

After a few beers, however, Mr. Chandler might tell a story that is not of the cheerful maritime sort:

“I played Carnegie Hall twice before I was 13.”

“I was known for my Bach.”

“They turned me into a trained monkey.”

“If I could forget about music I would.”

When asked to say more, he shrugs, and the stories fade into the barroom haze. But this mysterious specter follows him to his boat. When music is playing on the radio, if a certain violin concerto comes on, he may get up and switch the station off. “The violin upsets me,” he said. “It reminds me of terror.”

In the 1960s, Mr. Chandler was one of the most promising classical violin prodigies in New York.

Details in this article gnaw at my brain. If Chandler was one of the most promising violin prodigies in New York during the 1960s, with a career as a soloist in Europe as well, why are there no reviews of his concerts anywhere to be found in newspapers online? Vadukul mentions newspapers "that chronicled his talents."

(Michael only found one reference to Chandler--then Lipshutz--playing the solo part in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5 when he was a student at New Providence High School in New Jersey in 1963.)

I think that Chandler might, in the course of the past 50 years, augmented his accomplishments. I think that Vadukul, who knows about music from reading at least one book about musical prodigies, wanted to believe him.

I can't imagine how a violin that had been sitting in its unopened case for 50 years and gave off a musty odor could look like this:

I wonder how, after 50 years, the violin could have a bow with it that still had hair, a bridge and sound post that were both still standing, and strings that still looked new.

Mozart's Thematic Catalog

You can see (and read) Mozart's Thematic Catalog online at the British Library. It is hyped as being a diary where he composed his later works (which it is not), but it is still remarkable to see.



The viewer takes some time to load, and the pages take some time to resolve, so exercise patience . . .

Private Thoughts (made public here)

Yesterday flutist Rebecca Johnson and pianist Cara Chowning played three pieces of mine ("For Poulenc," "In light we see, in light we are seen," and "Cante Jondo") on a concert of music written by living American women.

I went to the concert alone, and sat by myself. My experience in this public setting felt very private. I marveled at the creativity of the musicians, and observed that there were "things" in the music that were new to me ("things" being more than the notes, rhythms, dynamics, and articulations). It was overwhelming to encounter the combined emotions of Rebecca and Cara through music that I thought I knew really well. And there were moments during the performance when I actually had chills. All my pieces were new to everyone in yesterday's audience (except for me, of course). Now they are pieces that "belong" in some way to everyone who was there.

Listening to this concert made me realize a little more about the enormity of music. Music is far more than what is written on the page by the composer. It is far more than any one musician's individual sound, technique, style, or sense of line. It is far more than any one person's particular emotional relationship with the materials at hand, and even more than the combined emotional relationship that the musicians enjoy through the music and share with the audience.

In this case the audience happened to be members of my own community, since this concert happened in my own small college town. People play my music all over the world, but there's something especially meaningful to me when it is played in my own neighborhood, and for my neighbors.

A few months ago Rebecca and Cara made some video recordings of these three pieces, and when the videos are all finished (the audio and the video need to be mysteriously merged), I will post them here.