Orchestral Island

The experience of a single-day orchestral concert with a rehearsal in the morning and a performance at night is, for me, kind of like being on an orchestral island. It is like an island in time, and can be a remarkable experience, particularly when it involves music that is both great and challenging to play well.

This past Saturday I had the chance to play a concerto concert that was part of a piano festival at the University of Illinois. The orchestra was full of friends, some I hadn't seen for many months, and some I hadn't seen for a year, and the music we played (the first movements of the Mozart Piano Concerto #17, the Schumann Piano Concerto, the first Rachmaninoff Concerto, and all of the Gershwin Concerto) was terrific. Three of the soloists were students at the festival, and the pianist who played the Gershwin was on the festival faculty.

My "normal" orchestral playing mindset (when there are rehearsals over a number of days) is to have the music running in my head in the "background" while I am doing other things, and in the "foreground" when I am practicing for the concert. It often runs through my head when I am trying to sleep. But after the concert is over there is kind of a "dump" that happens, and other things take over, like music I am writing, or non-concert music that I am practicing.

But in this case I haven't had the chance for the music to run its course in my mind (partially because for three of the pieces we only played the first movements), so I have an extended medley of the exposition of the Mozart followed by various passages from the opening, middle, and ending of the Schumann, the hard enharmonic passages and nice viola melodies from the Rachmaninoff, and one exciting passage after another from the Gershwin.

It is nearly midnight, and I'm writing this post now so that when it is finished I can stop thinking about both the music from the concert and about writing a post about it.

So here we are.

But the experience on Orchestral Island also involves the tremendous kind of interpersonal communication that goes on when forty or fifty musicians spend their rehearsal time in fully-focused concentration. The like-mindedness and connection that happens during the four or five hours of playing together is like nothing else in the world. And when you mix in really great soloists, and a conductor who really understands the music and is capable of communicating that understanding, it is really difficult to return to the "normal" life of a solitary musician.

Maybe that is why the music keeps running through my head. It was such a positive experience for me that in spite of the mental and physical stress connected with learning my part quickly, and the really hard work and concentration that is involved with playing a concerto program on such a small amount of rehearsal time, I really didn't want it to end.

But now this blog post has come to an end. Maybe I'll be able to get some sleep.

The Forest Near Ingolstadt for Soprano, Cello, and Piano

The text of this piece is adapted from chapter eleven of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the only passage in the novel that I find appropriate for a musical setting.

It takes place in the moment that the monster becomes aware of his senses. He experiences pleasure when seeing the moon, and can contrast that pleasure with his feelings of hunger and thirst. He notices that over time day turns into night and back into day. He also notices the sounds of birds. He tries to imitate them, but can't.

[March 11, 2023]

The music and a computer-generated recording are available on this page of the IMSLP. You can also listen here. The piece is in three movements, and lasts around thirteen minutes.

The New Grown-Ups Treehopper

Our son Ben Leddy and his Boston-based band have just released a recording, and I think it is fantastic. Make sure to listen to "Goodbye," which Ben wrote when he was a teenager, and sings with the perspective of an adult (and with such a beautiful voice). The instrumental playing is really remarkable too. All of it.

I'm so proud to be the mother of one of the New Grown-Ups.

Meditation on the best-known musical Méditation

I think that the best known musical meditation is the one from Jules Massenet's 1894 Opera Thaïs. The action that accompanies this piece happens offstage, when Thäis leaves her life as a pleasure-seeking courtesan, and enters religious life. After the Méditation, the monk Athanaël, who had persuaded Thäis to convert, realizes that he is in love with her.

The Méditation is set for solo violin, two harps, winds, and a chorus of closed-mouth singers. For my transcription for viola and piano I transposed the piece into G major (a fifth lower), and rewrote the piano part to better reflect the colors, pitches, and motion of the original score.

Martin Pierre Marsik's piano reduction of the Méditation was published by Heugel in 1894, and I imagine it was approved by Massenet. But Marsik's piano reduction doesn't sound very good transposed a fifth lower, and a need for a setting of the piece for viola and piano wasn't on anybody's radar during Massenet's lifetime.

Just for a lark, after making my viola and piano edition, I made a personal copy transposed back into the original key, and when I played it on the violin with a pianist friend, it felt better to play with than the Marsik piano reduction. But I guess I am a bit biased.

My edition is now available from the International Music Company (and will be among the new issues on this page soon), and I am very grateful that they respected my choice to rewrite the piano part.

Campagnoli

In the ten years since I wrote a post about Bartolomeo Campagnoli's Opus 22 Caprices for Viola and their relationship to the solo violin music of Johann Sebastian Bach, more of Campagnoli's work has been uploaded to the IMSLP. I was thrilled to find his five-volume Opus 21 Violin Method, which has, to my surprise and delight, violin versions of a handful of his viola caprices in the more advanced volumes.

Dedicated to the Duke of Cambridge, this lavish book has 132 progressive duets, and 118 solo violin etudes.

I like the above engraving of Campagnoli so much more than this wigged portrait:

While playing through the viola caprices this week (informed with my new knowledge about the differences between my bow arm when playing the violin and the viola), I observed that these caprices are not pieces to teach students how to play the viola. They are pieces written for violinists with advanced technique to help them learn what they have to do in order to play the viola well.

I'm excited about exploring all of the Campagnoli in the IMSLP:

Most interesting to me is the piece L'Illusion de la viole d'amour, Op.16 that is under the "compositions" tab. Unfortunately there is only one of the two parts available there. Maybe in another ten years the other part will come to light.

Long Tones and Summer Band Camp

It is band camp season in my university town. Summer after summer we hear hours of long tones played in unison on the fields adjacent to our neighborhood. And the percussionists work with an ultra-loud metronome.

I wonder if the improvement that band camp students experience in their playing during the week of camp is because of sustained (ha! what a pun) long tone practice.

During the school year, when a band rehearsal might last for a fifty-minute-long class period, there is simply not enough time for an extensive and leisurely long tone warm-up. At camp it becomes a community meditation, where you can turn off your brain, open up your breathing mechanism, and open your ears.

I imagine that during the school year most middle school and high school band students don't spend a hour of their after-school time practicing long tones, particularly when they have scales and etudes to practice and pieces to learn.

DIY Roku Streaming Stick Extender Supporter

We have a "dumb" TV, and all access to the world via said "dumb" TV comes to us through a fiber optic network.

We use a Roku stick and an extender (which I believe we got for free), because the plain stick gets very hot very quickly when connected.

The problem with the stick and the extender is that things get heavy on the back end, and instead of providing an aesthetically preferable right angle, we have at least the look of instability distracting us from our viewing experiences.

My solution? Three black hair ties and one Command brand adhesive hook.

Of plumb bobs and bow arms

I believe that my violin playing has improved significantly since my attention to my right arm while practicing has been "in the toilet."

[See this post for reference]

But upon returning to serious viola practice (my mother, or perhaps father tongue), I noticed that keeping the bow stick lower than the arm simply doesn't work if I want to make the sound that is in my ear. With my eyes glued to the mirror, I notice that the bow stick feels and sounds best when I have it either at an equal level to my arm, or in some cases a little bit higher. Instead of feeling that my right hand is like a weightless ball floating in a toilet tank, it feels (staying with plumbing water metaphors) more like there is a gently weighted plumb bob hanging somewhere between my forearm and my elbow, and my hand, while not being tense, responds slightly to that weight.

Except for the fact that moving around on a smaller instrument is easier, my left hand feels pretty much the same on both the violin and the viola (I have large hands for my height, broad fingers, and a square palm). I have always known that I had to do things differently with the right hand in order to sound natural on the violin, but until yesterday I never knew exactly what.

Practicing the Campagnoli Opus 22 Caprices with a viola-specific (perhaps my viola-specific) stick-to-arm relationship provides mind-expanding bow-arm-height awareness.

[N.B. The violist Paul Silverthorne gently pointed out to me that plumb bobs are not used in plumbing, although both come from plumbum which is Latin for lead.]

Paper Organ!

Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann both probably loved E.T.A. Hoffmann's novel Kater Murr, and I can certainly understand why. Michael and I have just started the second part of the novel, and so far Hoffmann's characters have discussed the lute, the tromba marina, the viola d'amore, and the paper organ.

The paper organ in the novel is said to resemble an instrument in the Imperial Court of Art in Vienna made by Eugenius Casparini (1623-1706).

Imagine my surprise when I did a quick search for "paper organ" and found that people can make organs that actually work out of paper and cardboard.





And while we are on the subject, why not learn about making "conventional" organ pipes from paper:



And then there's a paper ukulele.

If you haven't done so already, be sure to go to Aliaksei Zholner's YouTube channel and explore.

See you there!

Telemann's Tafelmusik Sonata à 4 in a String Orchestra Transcription

Like his slightly younger friends George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach (both born in 1685), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) enhanced his native German style of writing with contemporary French and Italian styles. His Musique de Table or Tafelmusik, one of the last examples of music to be played played at court feasts was published in 1733.

Tafelmusik is a collection of eighteen pieces divided into three sets of six. The Sonata à 4, TWV 43:d1 is the second piece in the second set. It was written for two transverse flutes, a solo alto recorder (or a solo bassoon), and continuo.

I have loved this piece since I first played it as a flutist nearly forty years ago (the first concert I ever played as a student at Juilliard). I think that it is one of Telemann's best pieces. You can listen to a recording of this arrangement here.

And you can find the score and a set of parts on this page of the IMSLP.

You can also hear a very nice recording by Musica Amphion of the original here:

First Movement
Second Movement
Third Movement
Fourth Movement

Of bow arms and toilet tanks

My obsession with improving my bow arm continues. And Casorti (mentioned and linked to in a post I made last week) has revealed a secret to me, which I will share with you.

That sentence about keeping the arm lower than the stick is a little bit different from the advice he gives in the beginning of the book, where he says, in item number six, to keep the elbow below the height of the stick:

This thought has been, as they say, a game changer for me. My arm, which is shaped like a stick when fully extended, is easy to see with my eyes, and also easy to "see" with my inner vision, so my attention can get to it immediately. My elbow, being a joint that is often in motion, feels farther away: it takes more of my visual imagination to figure out where it is in space, so adjusting it can come too late for a given musical "situation."

And then I started to think about the inside of an old-school toilet tank.

If the tightness or looseness of the screw that attaches the floating ball mechanism to the tank is incorrect, making the angle of the "stick" a little too acute or obtuse, the toilet runs. If it is correct, allowing the stick that attaches to the ball to let it float to the best place, it doesn't run. I have somehow been able to connect this image with my bow arm very quickly, and make corrections mid stroke. Just keeping my mind in the toilet, I guess.

"Windy Nights" and "I am also fond of lonely islands" on the 2024 Syllabus!

I am very proud to share that two of my recent solo viola pieces are included in the ABRSM (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) syllabus for 2024.

Both pieces are available in the IMSLP.

This is my quest . . .

Some people want fame, some people want money, but what I want is to have a bow arm that can work like David Oistrakh's bow arm. I'm willing (and eager) to put in the necessary time and discipline, because I know it will be worth it. Even if I don't make it to the full Oistrakh, a little improvement is enough for me.

My latest daily companion is Casorti, who wrote a great book of exercises back in 1909 to improve the bow arm. I found a copy in the IMSLP. You can find it here.

New Summer Strings Arrangements for 2023

Our local Summer String orchestra has "road tested" some new arrangements, which I am happy to share (gratis) with people who need music to play with community groups or with summer string camps for kids.

If you would like to have the music for any of these pieces or access to a library of (gasp) more than 160 original arrangements for string orchestra that all include a special violin 2b part for beginning violinists (violinists to-be), please send me an email message (my email address is over in the "profile" part of the sidebar), and I will send you a link to the folder.

Rye update . . .

I have now settled into making the best Ryvita replacement ever, and am ready to share. I enjoy the act of making this so much that I make one loaf at a time, using sourdough starter that I keep in the fridge and feed every few days. Michael prefers other breads, so I can adjust this bread to have the taste and texture I prefer.

Here's what I do:

I soak one cup rye berries in a mason jar filled with water and fitted with a screen. After an overnight soak I rinse and drain the rye berries, wrap the mason jar in a clean dishtowel, and let the berries just begin to sprout, rinsing and draining once or twice a day.

(Some organic rye berries that I got from an Amish supermarket on a Friday morning started to sprout by Sunday morning.)

Next, I cover the sprouted berries with water and grind them up with an immersion blender until they are very smooth. I pour all but three-quarters of cup or so into a big bowl. I add a cup of my sourdough starter from the fridge to the newly-pulverized berry and water mixture, and put the remaining three-quarters of a cup of ground-up fresh berries into my starter jar, which I put back in the fridge.

I add a little under two teaspoons of salt to the mixture of sourdough starter and freshly ground berries in the big bowl, and then I stir in one cup of high protein (winter wheat) flour, and one cup of dark rye flour.

I mix it all up, put a plastic lid on the bowl, and let it sit in a warm place all day, checking it from time to time to see if it needs some mixing. If it does, I mix it around with a spatula.

Before going to bed I transfer the dough into a loaf pan, cover it, and pop it in the fridge.

I bake it in the morning at 350 degress for an hour. Then I take it out of the pan and let it cool. Then I let it sit for a day or so before slicing it into thin slices, putting it a freezer bag, and putting it in the freezer (not waiting results in bread that has uneven moisture).

Every few days I take half a loaf or so out of the freezer, put the slices on a half sheet pan, and toast those slices at 350 for about 20 minutes (less or more depending on the thickness of the slices), and then I store the resulting crunchy, chewy, nutty, tasty slices in a covered container, where they would last for at least a week if I didn't eat them all up first.

When the supply looks low, I measure out a cup of rye berries to soak and sprout again.

If bread is the staff of life, this process gives my life a wonderful rhythm, and loaves that sing (literally--like French bread they crackle and pop when they come out of the oven).