Alpine Adventures Online

Michael and I just read the ninteenth-century novella Bergkristall by Adalbert Stifter. We read it in an English translation (as Rock Crystal) by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. The story takes place in (mostly) the area between two small Austrian towns that sit at the foot of a snow-capped mountain. The physical description of the area, and the cultural matters between the two towns reminded me of the culture of Schladming, the small town where I worked from September of 1980 through August of 1981. It was still a small town then. Everyone knew everyone.

I was curious to see the location of the two towns in the story, so I looked for them in Google Maps. The town called Millsdorf (literally Mill-town) is purely fictional, and the other, called Gshaid, has a name similar to a town in the region around Schladming. From that, I imagined that the mountain might have been the Dachstein, the mountain the loomed large over Schladming, because it is the only glacier in that part of Austria.

I wondered if there might be any connection between Adalbert Stifter and Schladming.



And then I found a street named after him there!

I did a search for Stifter and Ramsau, the plateau above Schladming that leads to the Dachstein, and I found this:



The plot thickens. This fantastic writer was also a painter.

In a search for Stifter and Dachstein, I learned that Stifter was very close friends with Friedrich Simony, the first person to cross the Dachstein glacier (in 1842). It was through Stifter's writing and artwork that Simony, the Dachstein, and its environs became widely known.

This excerpt from Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study by Eric Blackall does have a few spoilers, but it clearly identifies the Dachstein-specific inspiration for the story.

Here are some posts about Schladming, and here's a link to a post about a piece of music I wrote for wind ensemble called "The Dachstein."

The Past, the Distant Past, and the Present

I spent some of 1980 and much of 1981 teaching flute and recorder in a music school in Schladming Austria (I made posts about some of my experiences here and here), and every once in a while I search for Schladming on line.

It had quite a bit of tourism in 1980, and because of its location at the foot of the Planai and the Dachstein (an actual Alp), it was a kind of winter wonderland. I did go skiing once, but it was far too expensive an activity for my small salary to support, so I never went again. I really did like the off season (but it seems that there is no longer an off season), when interesting groups of people would come to town to have meetings. My favorite, by far, was when a conference of nuclear physicists came to town, and a group of physicists knocked on the door of the music school to see if some of them could use a piano to play chamber music. The person who knocked on the door happened to be Hans Grumm, my father's doppleganger. I showed him my father's picture, and Hans' response was, "I could shave in that picture." When my father came to Vienna with the BSO (and I was living in Vienna), I introduced him to Hans. It was a great moment.

This is what Schladming looked like in 1680:



The engraving is by Georg Matthäus Vischer. I taught in one of the buildings directly across from the church. The address was Pfarrgasse 1. Schladming had a fire in 1681, and the city was rebuilt sometime during the 1680s. Pfarrgasse 1 had certainly been renovated (or perhaps rebuilt) in the 17th century.

This is pretty much what Schladming looked like when I lived there (the rebuilt yellow church on the left is in the same location as the one in the picture):



Here's a more current shot from Google Maps:



The music school is now gone, and Pfarrgasse 1 is now CityHouse Apartments.



This could very well have been my teaching studio (which was in the center of the second floor, overlooking the street).

Making Christmas Cookies with Frau Schultz

I can't recall Frau Schultz's first name, but I'll never forget the afternoon in September when she invited me to her house to help make Christmas Cookies. Now, I admit, I'm not much of a Christmas person, but I have very fond memories attached to the Christmas I spent in Schladming, Austria in 1981.

Frau Schultz taught recorder and accordion in the Stadtmusikschule Schladming. She was the senior member of the faculty, with so much experience that she could identify wrapped Christmas presents that the students would give to their teachers. She insisted that all the teachers in the school have a coffee pause put into their schedule, and she always made the coffee and brought the treats, which she often baked. Frau Schultz, who had grown children who had moved away, was always very maternal towards me.

When I came to her house to make Christmas cookies, I was given a huge bowl of hazelnuts and a mechanical device used to crack them. We cracked the hazelnuts, and then ground them into a meal. We mixed them with the other mystery ingredients to make the teig. I had never cooked in Austrian before: everything was measured by weight and not by volume. After everything was mixed together, we put the dough into a container, and Frau Schultz brought it down to her basement to cure for what I imagine would be a few months.

I imagine that Schladming was a town very much like the town where "Silent Night" was written, especially at night, and especially in the winter. Unlike the glittering lights of American Christmastime, there was a softness and a lightness to the Austrian celebration. For an officially Catholic country, the celebrations in Schladming were remarkably secular; and they were filled with remarkable food. Everything was quiet that Christmas, and really kind of magical.

Stadtkappelle Schladming!

When I taught flute and recorder in Schladming, Austria in 1980 and 1981, I played with the Stadtkappelle Schladming. Two of my flute students played with me. This video from the early 1980s shows the group at its very best (playing without music!) One of my flute students, Anita Stocker, is here, and it looks like the other flutist could be a teenage version of my recorder student Judith Pohle, or even Anita Ebenschweiger. The clarinetist who gets a few solo shots is Hans Plank, who was the director of the music school.



Here's a video from 1986:

Early Music: Choosing an Instrument

Recorder was my first instrument by default, not by design. It just happened to be around (thanks to S&H Greenstamps) when I happened to be sick one day and wasn't able to go to Kindergarten. I thought nothing of it, but it was the instrument that taught me to read music. When I started playing violin at around 7, I already knew how to read the treble clef.

When I got my first real job teaching at the Stadtmusikschule Schladming (a big name for a small school in a very small Austrian town), I found that I was required to teach about four flute students and about 40 7-year-old beginning recorder students. There was a recorder in my desk drawer, and I scoured around to find a copy of the method book that the students would be using. I was very new to German, hadn't touched the recorder since I was 5, and was terrified at the prospect of teaching something I didn't know anything about in a language that I could barely speak.

The Stadtmusikschule Schladming had a system where all the entering students took soprano recorder lessons. After a year of recorder they could choose a "real" instrument: clarinet, trumpet, trombone, piano, violin, cello, accordion, percussion, guitar, flute, or alto recorder. There was no "playing by ear" or "playing by feel." The students learned how to read, how to count, and how to play with one another in groups. To my shock, it was absolutely painless and was a great success. All the students had a year to figure out what instrument they wanted to play the next year. Everything they learned as beginning recorder players could translate to their new instrument, and they could make their way into the Stadtkappelle Schladming as full-fledged members within a year or two, as long as they were wind or brass players.

When I left that job I headed straight to Vienna to study recorder. I had fallen deeply in love with the instrument.

What strikes me as remarkable is the chance to study music while being given a grace period to decide what "grown up" instrument you want to play. Choosing an instrument has everything in the world to do with personality and temperament. Here in American we are kind of at the mercy of a Darwinian survival of the fittest system when it comes to music, and the survival rate is terribly low. In my Midwestern town, that has a band program in the schools but does not have a string program, kids are given aptitude tests to determine what instrument they should play in the 5th grade band. The "smart" kids are always assigned to the oboe, because the band directors seem to think that it requires more brains than other instruments. (I like Blair Tindall's story about getting assigned to play the oboe in her school because her name was late in the alphabet, and all the cool instruments were taken by kids with last names that started with letters that came earlier in the alphabet.) I only know one survivor of the "smart-kid" system, and she might actually have chosen the oboe on her own.

Musical natural selection comes into play through success and failure. If one person's lips, tongue, or facial muscles are not ideal for making a good sound on any particular wind instrument, other people with more appropriate physiology will be successful at that instrument. No matter how musical or expressive Person A is, s/he will feel like a failure, and might give up music altogether.

PIPE DREAM ALERT:

In my ideal music school, I would start 7-year-old children with recorder, and I would expose them to the repertoire of all the orchestral instruments during that year. I would explain the personal requirements of being a wind player, brass player, or percussionist: being able to count rests, being able to figure out who to tune to at what time, being able to deal with pressure and competition, being able to play solos without getting too nervous, showing up on time, and being able to deal with knives, cane, and frustration. I would explain what is necessary to succeed as a string player: being able to play people sitting next to you and all around you, being able to blend, being able to deal with coordinating both hands and arms, being able to pay attention to bowings, being able to read more than one clef, and practicing a whole lot more than wind players when it comes to orchestral music, because string players have so many more notes to play.

I would also discuss repertoire. People who want to play wind instruments should be warned that there is little in the Romantic solo repertoire for them, unless they play the clarinet. Flute players had better like baroque music and 20th century music, because the pickings are slim during the 19th century. Brass players should know that their Classical Period music is restricted mainly to orchestral music and a few concertos. People with a deep desire to play classical chamber music should think carefully about being brass players, unless they play French Horn.

I would also make it a requirement at my school for everyone take a few years of piano lessons, and I would require that everyone spend a lot of time singing, thus increaing the number of pianists and singers without lowering the numbers of local orchestral musicians.

Local Music

It just dawned on me the other night (at Rebecca and Cara's concert), that I have written just about all my music and just about all of my arrangements in our 1,500 square foot home that sits on a little hill in our small Illinois town. And then I started thinking of places that I have lived, and how different every place sounded.

I associate memories of Newton, Massachusetts with the sound of my father practicing Bach, and recordings: Bach Cantatas from Germany (DGG Archiv), music from the Renaissance that was being recorded by the pioneers of historically informed performance, Brahms and Schumann chamber music recordings from the small collection of old recordings that my parents kept in a small cabinet, recordings of music by Charles Ives that “smelled” of New England, the great 1970s popular music that was played on radios in every store, and in every car (except for our car when I wasn't driving), and my own constant practicing.

I don't remember much in the way of birdsong, but I do remember reading that Sibelius felt that birdsong influenced the way music sounded in various countries. Even though our house was located on the edge of a park, the only birds I remember hearing were robins and crows.

Beyond Newton, there was the music of the trolley (now called the “T”), and those sounds accompanied me as I traveled to concerts and rehearsals. Many of the concerts I heard included atonal music, but I mostly associate atonal music with Tanglewood, where I spent my summers. The “brown” mixture of twelve-tone music, avant-garde music, orchestral music, and the din of many different people practicing is oddly comforting to me. The memory of that sound is somehow married to the memory of the smell of the Tanglewood mud that has been permeated over the decades with cigar smoke. I wanted to be a composer when I spent time at Tanglewood, but I knew that I couldn't be creative in avant-garde or twelve-tone ways of writing. I hoped, even then, that tonality would return to be an acceptable tool for writing music.

The sounds of New York were mostly sounds of my own practicing and the hum of the Juilliard heating and air conditioning system. I found New York to be the place I lived with the least room for creativity, but the best place I have lived for learning about the creativity of others. The music that filled the air in the parks and in the streets vibrated with excitment and rhythm, but it usually drowned out whatever original ideas I thought I might have had.

But I did start to write my first piece there. It was an Elegy for a dear friend who had died. We had been studying Bartok String Quartets in a class, and I guess the idea of setting the musical idea I had in my head for string quartet seemed right. I believe my “piece” was sixteen measures or so. I finished it in 2003, when I had the space to develop my ideas.

The next place I lived was Schladming, Austria. I remember walking in the woods there, and “hearing” Schubert in the trickling of the streams, and in the Enns river. The birds might have even been singing Schubert songs. It was my first experience hearing local music that I felt came from the earth. When I moved to Vienna, I heard different music in the air. I wrote about it in a post from 2005 (two decades ago!), and will share an excerpt here:

Music is hanging around the air in Vienna. It always has been there, and it probably will always be there. Fritz Pauer told me that it has something to do with the water that flows in the underwater canals. Even in the silence of the night in Vienna, there is a certain musical rhythm in the air. Anyway, one day while I was walking in Vienna I started singing a tune. I figured it must have been something that I heard, but I couldn't place it. I sang it for Leo [Leo Wright], and he had never heard it before either. He helped me harmonize it with jazz chords, and I let it rattle around in my brain for about 20 years until I turned it into a piece for string quartet that I called “Good-bye to Vienna.” Of course I dedicated it to Leo, who is no longer alive in body, but will always be alive in spirit.

After Vienna I lived in Hong Kong, which “sounded” like New York to me. And whatever creative expression I might have had when I lived there was drowned out by a great deal of struggle and a great deal of artifice. I returned to Boston, and was happy to see (and hear) that the city sounded pretty much the same as it sounded when I was growing up. It looks different now (forty years later), but the T still makes the same sound, and there is still a feeling of musical possibility in the air.

As much as I would like to hear music in the air in Chicago, it has never happened for me. But when visiting Los Angeles (where our daughter used to live) the air seems to vibrate with major seventh chords. Even if I could afford to live there, I would never get any work done if I did.

My home in Illinois (for the past four decades) has given me the greatest creative space I could ever ask for. The local natural world, with its various bodies of running water, like the creek in our backyard and the Embarass river, reminds me a little of the music in the air in the hills around Schladming as well as the music below the surface of the earth in Vienna. The bird life around here contains a universe of songs. Every imaginable migrating species seems to pass through our area, and our yard is lively with birdsong at every time of the year. The landscape sings to me, particularly in late August and in September.

I wrote a piece called “Coles County August” which grew out of the kind of light and natural excitement that happens here every August. And I am happy to share a performance of it by Coles County pianist Kara Huber. She grew up here in rural Illinois, and now has an international career as a solo pianist.

This area has also given me more playing opportunities than I could have ever expected from the other places I have lived. I had the opportunity to remake myself as an instrumentalist, because I have had the time and space to practice and learn. I enjoy playing in orchestras, in string quartets, and in an early music group. I also get to write arrangements for our local Summer Strings orchestra to play for the community. Making a dozen or so new arrangements every year for practical use by local string players keeps me challenged and stimulated year after year. I have also been able to write music for some terrific professional musicians in the area, some who live within driving distance (some even within walking distance), and some who have passed through, and moved away.

AI (Actual Intelligence)

I hate the ways robotic entities have taken over so many parts of my life. I no longer memorize phone numbers, addresses, or even directions. If I need to look something up that could be found in a perfectly good dictionary (and we have many of the best in our house), I almost always look up what I need to know on my computer or my phone. It saddens me to say that I have found that the most up-to-date information about music and musicians of the past is online, making many of the music books that populate our bookshelves obsolete.

I get pleasure from wearing my Timex watch, from reading books on paper, from spending time talking with people in real time and, of course, from being able to read and play music on a handful of instruments with a great number of people.

A few years ago, when I started listening to the "Sold a Story" podcast, I found myself making a connection between the concept of children learning to read by using pictures and context clues rather than phonics, and learning to play an instrument (even at a high level) exclusively by listening and copying the playing and gestures of others, without learning how to read music.

As much as I enjoyed reading the Eri Hotta's book The Man & His Dream to Teach the Children of the World, I firmly believe that learning to play an instrument and learning to read music at the same time reinforces both the physical actions of playing and the mental activity of learning to understand what music is, and what music can be. 

While I think it is great for kids to play at music (singing, using instruments to improvise, and even to finding tunes they know on them), I prefer to wait until children are of reading age before teaching them the "proper how" of playing an instrument. And I believe with all my heart that if a person can read words, they can read music.

I taught myself to play the recorder when I was five or six. I learned how to play it and read music at the same time. I had a Hohner recorder that I bought using S&H Green Stamps. And after I could read the notes and rhythms on the recorder, learning to read music on the violin (which I did when I was seven, and by myself) was easy and made sense.

Recorder is a great gateway to playing any instrument. My return to the recorder happened when I was twenty. I got a teaching job in a music school in Schladming, Austria, and I expected that I would be teaching flute. But I learned on my first day there that I would be teaching thirty seven-year-olds to play recorder and two teenagers to play the flute. 

There was a soprano recorder in the desk drawer, and the book that my students would be using.

Since I would be teaching my students in German, and since my German was extremely rudimentary at the time, re-learning the recorder and figuring out how to teach it was just one more thing on my “plate.”

I started practicing the recorder immediately, using the book I found in the drawer, and I fell instantly and totally in love with the instrument.

But I have digressed.

The point I set out to make earlier in this post is that reading music and playing music without the use of any kind of electronic device works for me as a protective umbrella against the joys of life being taken over (or compromised) by artificial intelligence. And combatting the onslaught using musical means feels more and more like a subversive act: an act of defiance.

I started a new student on the soprano recorder last month. She is the first non-music-reading beginner recorder student I have taught in a very long time. 

The materials I used for teaching beginner recorder players thirty years ago did not work for her (or me), so I set to work writing a method that would. It has worked like a charm to get my new student to count, breathe, practice, and to read music, so I’m hoping that it can be of use for other teachers and students. I also hope that it might encourage people (grown-up people) who are of the "I can't read music" mindset to try their hands (and brains) at learning to read music. Like me, they might find it a buffer against the onslaught of more artificial intelligence influences creeping into our lives individually and globally.

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

There is absolutely no reason that a teacher could not use this book to offer a student on another instrument (wind, string, or brass) to help with learning to read pitches or rhythms. Sometimes beginning with three-quarter time as the "default" can be a good way into the brains of people who have trouble counting.

Solving technical problems with musical answers: thoughts about teaching

I got my "author's copies" of A Tunes this week, so I can assure you that physical copies are now available. It was a treat yesterday to teach lessons using a physical copy.

I thought that it might be a good idea to write a post expaining why I wrote it and what I hope teachers and students will get from using it. I have included a bit of my history for people who are not regular readers of this blog.

I have taught people to play, on one instrument or another, for more than forty years.  And I have also, from time to time, been in the position of being a beginner or a near beginner. When I showed up for my first day of my first real job, teaching at a music school in a small town in Austria (a week before the semester was to begin), I was shocked to see that the majority of my students were recorder students. I think that there might have been two flutists, and thirty (or more) beginning recorder players. I hadn't touched a recorder since I was six or seven--the age of many of my students. 

Fortunately there was a recorder in the top drawer of my desk, along with the beginner book my students would be using. I spent the whole week, when I wasn't studying German (which I barely spoke)  learning to play the recorder, and I fell in love with the instrument. As soon as I had enough money to do so (I arrived in Schladming with only pocket change), I bought a soprano recorder and an alto recorder.

I was shocked that my students learned to play the recorder and learned to read music. I attribute my succes to the fact that I taught myself to read music while playing the recorder when I was five or six (a Honer recorder bought with S&H Greenstamps that I put toothmarks in, because I didn't know not to--I can still remember the taste of the wood).

The kids I taught in Austria also liked the kid-oriented folk music that was in the excellent recorder book they used. It was probably used by all the kids in Austria who learned to play recorder in their music schools. In Austria recorder was the "entry level" instrument, after which you could move to any other instrument. Everyone learned to read music while playing the recorder. Just like I had.

[The mechanics of recorder playing at an elementary level are straightforward. The refinements, like bending your thumb in order to make a horizontal half hole when going up an octave, using the tongue to make a variety of articulations, mastering the fingerings in the upper octave, and adjusting the air so that you can play in tune, are not. I learned those through studying at the Hochschule in Vienna.]

I really wanted to play violin as a kid, but could not learn to play until I was seven because the smallest instrument we had in the house was a half size. And once I was big enough to fit that violin, my father gave me an "A-Tune-A-Day" book (OMG I just realized that the "A Tunes" title bears homage to that series of books!), and I vividly remember making a physical analogy to the written B on the A string using the first finger, just like the left hand (top hand) of the recorder, and that C used the second finger. And G used three fingers on the D string, just like the recorder. I made visual connections between what I saw on the page and what my left hand fingers could do to "get" the note to sound right.

When I moved to Illinois I had the idea of writing a beginner flute book for my flute students. I wanted to create the same visual and kinetic connections I had experienced when learning to play the recorder both the first time and the second time, and the way I learned to play the violin. I found that it was really useful. My students liked it, particularly the tunes that I made up myself in order to develop physical skills.

In my early 30s I returned to string playing. In my late  30s I started composing seriously. In my 40s I taught  violin and viola students using the Suzuki books, but not the method. As my abilities as a teacher improved, I started to see problems that every one of my students encountered while working through the Suzuki books. I do know that they were designed not to be "read from" by students, and that the main use was as reference for "by ear only" teaching, particularly for young students who were too young to read words fluently.

During in-person lessons with beginning students I could, by a multitude of means, get students to use a mixture of eye, ear, touch, and brain to get beyond reading by the numbers. I could use manipulative toys to help them to understand rhythm and the way it could relate to physical volume. They could listen and watch me play. We could play together. 

[nostalgic pause]

When I had to switch to on-line teaching last March, I realized that I needed to come up with new ways to help my students learn, so I started writing these "A Tunes" to address problems that I would normally need to be in the same physical space to work through. 

The first uses the pitches of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but in a different order, and with different rhythms. The "Starry Night" title is meant to draw a connection. A person who can play "Twinkle Twinkle" can play "Starry Night," a brand-new piece, written just for their skill level, doubling their repertoire.  It also sounds really good when students use the whole bow, from frog to tip, and the "sounding good" part is a great motivator for developing a bowstroke that is parallel to the bridge and can change speeds.

"Wait, What?" uses the same pitches as "Starry Night," and introduces quarter-note and half-note rests. There is one whole note, and a whole note that is tied to a quarter note, as well as easy and functional dynamics.

"Breeze in the Trees" introduces pizzicato and addresses the difficulties that students find in "Song of the Wind." There is a fermata that will be familiar to students who have played "Allegro" in the first Suzuki book. My students all really like fermatas.

"The Big Dipper" is in 3/4 time and it introduces slurs in a way that will feel nice and expressive in a beginning bow arm. It is a variation on "Starry Night," and uses the D string when it modulates to D major in the middle section.

"A Tunes" doesn't call for the lowered second finger until the "Solo Two-Step," which also introduces the idea of musical sequences (a melodic string of sixths going between two strings with a low second finger on the A string and the E string that my students really like). The pitches and rhythms are the same in the "Slurry Two-Step," but we get slurs and dynamics. It also begins up-bow, which introduces the idea of bowing logic early on. 

"String-Crossing Waltz" combines the meter of three with hooked quarter notes played on the same pitch. Many of my students have been befuddled by the down/up/up bowing pattern in the first of the Bach Minuets in the first Suzuki book. "String-Crossing Waltz" takes the pattern out of the Bach musical context and repeats it over and over. After studying this piece the Bach Minuet is far easier for students to play in rhythm because their arms know what to do.

"The Happy Farmer" is one of the most difficult pieces to teach (and learn) for beginner violinists. I wrote "Farmer's Crossing" to address each of the bowing difficulties separately. I also added left-hand pizzicato on open strings, which strengthens the left hand, and students really like doing. After working on "Farmer's Crossing" my students have been far happier farmers.

The two "Leading-Tone Gallops" (one slurred and one not slurred) in E minor teach students about the raised third finger and the fourth finger plopping down right next to it. The title gives a chance for a teacher to explain about scale structure. These Gallops,  "Gotcha!," and "The Fourth Heroic Muse" will help with the Gossec "Gavotte" and the Handel "Chorus" that begins the second Suzuki book. The Gallops also help navigate the fourth-finger waters found in the Bach Musette and the middle section of the Lully Gavotte (which, for the record, is really by Marin Marias).

The second Suzuki book works fine on its own for me until we get to the Beethoven Minuet in G, which is riddled with left-hand and right-hand difficulties. I wrote "Te Unim" to isolate the difficulties and put them in a vastly different musical context from the very familiar Beethoven piece.  The title is the word "Minuet" spelled backwards. I'm surprised how well it works with students.

"Goodnight Air" uses the rhythms of the well-known children's book Goodnight Moon, and introduces the way meter that changes in order to "hold" the rhythms of the music. The phrasing of the text becomes the phrasing of the music, and it playing the phrases expressively becomes a gateway for being expressive when playing other pieces of music. It can also serve as a gateway for students to write musical settings of poems they like. 

The Castor and Pollux Lullaby and Dance are harmonized (double-stop) versions of the "Starry Night" theme. They are in different meters, which provides an easy way to introduce compound time to students.

The "Vocalise" and "Appogiare with Variations" are just expresesive solo pieces, and they can be played by violinists at any level. One of my advanced students played some of these pieces as violin solos for a wedding she played this past October. 

All these pieces are written as expressive solo pieces that can be performed without the need for accompaniment. There is something empowering about being in charge of all of the music.

If "A Tunes" sells well in the original violin version, I'm hoping that Mel Bay will issue a version for viola.

You can order the music here.

Musical Community

I like to think that I am part of a large musical community, but, even though I play with several ensembles, teach (or have taught) a lot of students, and write music that is, more often than not, played by people I do not know, I am mostly a person who works alone. I imagine that there is an enormous community of composers, writers, visual artists, and inventors who work in isolation. We live in imaginary worlds where our subjects, characters, themes, and widgets relate to one another inside of our individual heads. In my opera-writing days I used to think of it as the theater inside my head.

But we isolated dreamers like to share our stuff with the insides of other people's heads. Coming together to make music is a real joy. But it takes work to arrange to come together, and it sometimes involves personal risk. Sometimes it involves personal friction.

I have, over the decades, been in organized musical situations that I have had to leave. I had to leave my teenage musical community because we all went our separate directions once school was over. I had to leave my Juilliard/New York musical community for personal and professional reasons. I had to leave my musical community in Schladming, Austria because I could not work under the psychological realities of that small town, and I had to leave my musical community in Vienna because, as a woman, a flutist, and a foreigner, I could not get adequate work there. I had to leave my musical community in Hong Kong because I could not extend my work visa, which ended up being a good thing both personally and logistically because the Hong Kong I lived in no longer exists.

I did not have much difficulty leaving my musical community in Boston because, upon returning after my years away, I didn't have time to establish a strong musical community there. Besides, I was excited to go off on a Midwestern adventure with my new husband.

The musical community in my new town was welcoming and vibrant, but, being a university town, people I grew close to would leave. And then, since we are all human, people I grew close to would die. Now I only know a few members of the music faculty at the university. I still make music with a healthy handful of friends, but I feel a distance from the organized musical communities that have developed in my town. I have spent decades building my own musical communities, but I know that if I do not do the work to promote and sustain them, they might cease to exist.

When Facebook came around I had a magical way of pretending that I was still a member of all those musical communities: the musicians I grew up with, the musicians I went to Juilliard with, the musicians I knew in Austria, the musicians I knew in Boston, and the musicians who used to live in my town. I thought that I might retain some of the connections to people I interacted with "there," but I haven't. I don't have email addresses or phone numbers for people I used to "know" "there." I wonder if any of the people who I was "friends" with on Facebook read this blog?

[If any of you are reading, please consider this an invitation to send me your email address so that we can keep in touch!]

I recently had to leave an organized musical community in another town that I loved being part of. I had to do it because of an embarrassing and insulting situation regarding a dear friend. I had no other choice than to put long-term friendship over organized musical community. I do not regret my decision, but I feel a great deal of sadness.

So I'm using this space to share my feelings, and hopefully I will be able to get to a place of closure.

Meanwhile, I guess I have scales to practice . . .

Letters as a source of history

My father sent me an envelope full of letters that I wrote to him during my time in Schladming (1980 and 1981). I was in my very early twenties, very forthcoming, on my own in Europe with my first job, and very full of myself. I read them through, put them in order, and put them back in the envelope. I put the envelope in a drawer. I'm not interested in reading them again, but they might interest a grandchild some day.

Or not. My handwriting is the same (how I wish that the Geha fountain pen I used exclusively at that time still worked), but I do not feel much kinship with the person who wrote those letters. A lot of growing can happen in forty years. To anyone reading this post who knew me at the time, I sincerely apologize for the many stupid things I must have said and done during my young years that I didn't write about in my letters home.

This letter incident mixes nicely in my mind with a little bit of interaction I had with an unidentified-here-but-otherwise highly-regarded musicologist (I'm not saying how long ago) concerning a well-known composer of the vast pre-internet past. This musicologist believes that a sometimes-identifying characteristic about this composer that some think of as culturally important is not really important, because sources (like letters) do not say anything about the connection this composer has to a particular cultural institution. I pointed out (in person--not in writing) two instances that point to what could be an important connection for this composer and her/his family to the (unnamed in this post) cultural institution. The musicologist had never thought about either item. If they did, it would challenge their whole thesis, and nullify the direction and focus of their scholarship.

If the only thing that survived after my demise was this packet of letters I wrote to my father forty years ago, nobody would know much about the adult person that I have become. This blog, a public record of my comings and goings, interests and projects, and bits of reflection on parts of my past that I choose to share, will, hopefully, give my grandchildren a better picture of the kind of life I built for myself as an adult. There was a lot I didn't write about (see the last sentence of the first paragraph) in my young adulthood that I would rather not remember. And if I didn't commit those events to paper with my Geha pen, nobody would know about events and associations in my past that might be significant enough to me not to be able to forget, and important enough for me to keep to myself so that they are never revealed. Please don't ask. I won't tell.

If I lived during a time when it was extremely dangerous to practice or be associated in any way with a particular religion, like Judaism, I would probably not write letters about it. I would confine my interactions concerning that matter to conversations with people who would also feel the need to keep their association with Judaism undocumented. Consider the conversos who practiced Judaism during the Spanish Inquisition. I would probably be very careful about my written communication if I were a non-communist in Soviet Russia.

I have thought often of under-documented relationships of the past, particularly the musical ones. I imagine that Mozart and Haydn spent a lot of undocumented time together in Vienna. I imagine that Schubert and Beethoven had an undocumented private friendship as well. There were also a great many interactions that these four composers had with other friends, musical and otherwise, and zillions of things we will never know about them. So much of music history seems to be stitched together from this (personal) letter here, that program there, somebody writing about meeting someone somewhere, and the occasional photograph or portrait.

[Consider Ethel Smyth's account of meeting Augusta Holmes when she showed up unannounced at her home. Smyth described Holmes as a "hag." Smyth didn't know that Holmes was very sick with cancer at the time. Smyth expected a woman of glamour and found a human being who was suffering from a very human disease. Smyth's impression is one that endured for a long time. Now that we are able to hear and see some of Holmes's music and know more about her life from other sources, we have the ability to make our own impressions.] 

 I believe it is what people who write music, make visual artwork, and write poetry, prose, and scripts (plays and movies) put in their work is what matters most. Letters can be fun (sometimes), but I think that a body of music is the best window into the mind of a composer. Actually, when all is said, done, practiced, rehearsed, and played, it is the only thing that matters.

Der Fluyten Lust (and amore) hof

In 1980 I came across a reprint of a volume of Jacob van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-hof in the Joseph Patelson Music House in New York. I was preparing to leave town (and country) with my modern flute and piccolo, and had really no idea where I was going after the six weeks I was planning to spend in an orchestra in Graz, Austria and an international flute competition I was attending in Budapest. I had only recently been introduced to the idea of jazz improvisation, and I thought that this little book might be a good way to learn to improvise in an idiom other than the Jazz idiom (which seemed terribly complicated to me at the time). I had no idea that there was a centuries-long tradition of "dividing" popular melodies, so I though that this book, which was actually something quite old, was something quite new.

(You would think that a Juilliard graduate would know something about music history, but this was not the case for me.)

Wouldn't you know it. I got a teaching position in a music school in the little town of Schladming, Austria where a large part of my job was to teach recorder. I hadn't played recorder since I was five or six, so I had to start from scratch with the little soprano Moeck that I found in the drawer of the desk in my studio. I spent the week before the beginning of the school year going through Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and I fell in love with the instrument and the music.

These are five of my favorite melodies from the collection. When I first got my viola d'amore, I tried these pieces out on the instrument. The divisions (all the melodies are divided) are rough, but the melodies are as rewarding to play on the viola d'amore as they are on the recorder.

Here's a link to a PDF of the above piece, and here's a link to the original set of publications from 1644-1656.

A Sense of Place

This morning while I was listening to Richard Tauber sing "I'm in Love with Vienna" in English, I believed him when he sang "I was born in Vienna," though I learned from reading the liner notes that came with the recording that he was born in Linz. I believe every word that Tauber sings, because he believes every word he sings. Of course Richard Tauber could not stay in Vienna because of the Nazis, so he started a whole new career in England, singing mainly in English.

This started me on a train of thought about place. Growing up outside of Boston I always felt like an outsider because I spoke like a person from the midwest, and try as I did, I could never even imitate a Boston accent. I was born in Cleveland, and when I was growing up I always held some kind of mythological connection to Cleveland in my heart. As a young adult I sought out friends from Cleveland. I guess it was from one of them that I heard that the street that held my home from birth to four-and-a-half was demolished in order to put in a highway or something.

When I left Boston for New York, Boston felt like "home" for the first time, but only for a year or two, and only when I wasn't there. It also began to change, and it is no longer the place I remember. I used to feel at home at Tanglewood, and then it changed. When I lived in New York, I never quite felt like a New Yorker (that pesky midwestern accent again), but I felt somewhat comfortable in a place that was filled with a lot of misplaced people and a lot of history. I also had good friends. I felt out of place in Schladming, the town in Austria where I lived for a year, but I felt at home in Vienna. Unfortunately I didn't have a real place to live in Vienna, and I couldn't find any work. It is not surprising that I never felt at home in Hong Kong.

It is surprising that I really don't feel at home in the little town in the midwest where I have lived for the last 22 years. Most of the things I have liked about it in years past are no longer here, and so many of the people I have grown close to have either moved away or died. Once I felt like a vital part of the musical life in town, and now I feel like a stranger, or maybe a guest. Sometimes I even feel like a ghost.

Oddly I always feel at "home" sitting in an orchestra--anywhere. I always feel "at home" going through stage doors. I have always been able to go to any stage door and walk into the hall. For some reason I look like I belong there: people have even told me so. (I have gotten into a lot of concerts for free that way.) I feel at home in my house with my family, and I feel at home when I'm teaching, when I'm playing chamber music, and when I'm practicing.

Today I started working on the Bach B-flat Partita (on the piano), and I felt oddly "at home." My younger brother used to practice it when we were kids, and I always wanted to be able to play it. I think that music, particularly Bach, is a wonderful constant to have, especially in a world where there are so many physical changes that rob us of continuity and mess around with our memories and our sense of place in the world.

Competitions past and Future

I am very excited about the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis because I will have the opportunity to go to Indianapolis to hear the final round of the competition and write about it for Strings and the American Record Guide. The competition begins on September 3, and all the rounds will be broadcast in real time over the web through the competition website.

Though I don't like "competition" as a rule when it comes to music, some of my most interesting experiences, musical and otherwise, happened at an international flute competition in Budapest, Hungary. I went to Budapest to play in the competition in September of 1980, between a summer orchestral job in Graz, Austria, and a job that I was going to begin at the end of September in Schladming, Austria.

Hungary was still a communist country in 1980, and its currency was "soft," meaning you could convert currency from Western Europe into forins, but you couldn't convert forins back into Western European currency. I didn't know anything about this at the time, so I converted nearly all my cash (it wasn't much) into forins, and had a blast in Budapest buying music (it was really cheap) and eating in restaurants. When it was time to leave Budapest I had what amounted to $35.00 tucked in a hiding place in my wallet, and that was the only way I could take the train from the Hungarian border to my destination in Austria.

All the flutists who played in the competition stayed in the same dormitory. There were people from all over the world, and I found that the people from Eastern Europe were particularly friendly. German was the common language then, but there were a bunch of people who were excited to speak in English. I remember one flutist from Budapest invited me to her house, which was palatial. Her father was some kind of party official, and she lived a rather charmed life. I also visited with a violinist friend named Maria Vermus who taught at the music academy in Budapest and was not connected with the party. She was a great violinist, one of finest I have ever heard, but even with a teaching position at a fine school she lived in near poverty.

The first round of the competition consisted of one of the Bach Sonatas for flute and continuo (the C major, E minor, or E major--I chose the E major). I remember reading through the piece with the harpsichordist who played for everyone in the competition, and then meeting another harpsichordist, a student at the Academy named Geza, who was very eager to talk (in English) about my rather funky (now it would be considered historically-informed performance practice) way of playing Bach. He also wanted to talk about Western philosophy and play some sonatas together. Geza brought up all kinds of things that I had never thought about like the different national styles in Bach's writing for flute.

When I heard the Italian flutist Massimo Merceli play the C major Bach Sonata, I understood exactly what the Italian style, as explained to me by Geza, was all about. Massimo played beautifully, but he didn't make it past the preliminary round. When it was time for me to play I completely re-thought my E major Sonata, and I played it in the Italian style. I had a wonderful time pIaying, and was really happy to have gotten new musical insights from Geza, the Hungarian harpsichordist, and from hearing one of my fellow competitors play in a way that was truly beautiful. I didn't make it into the semi-final round either. Maybe the judges, who I believe were mostly French, didn't particularly like the Italian style of playing Bach. Who knows.

I had a great time in Budapest after the prelimary round was over. I can't remember who won the competition, but I do know that Massimo, who played in a way that really meant something, has a career as a soloist now.

A Farewell to A Farewell to Arms

When I lived in Schladming back in 1980, the very small Austrian city had a tiny library. There were only a couple of English books in it, so A Farewell to Arms was a relief to read since I spent so much of my life communicating clumsily in German. As an expatriate I suppose I connected with the protagonist, and as a young person I suppose I connected with the intensity of the love relationship (based, it seems, mostly on an attraction I would now consider kind of superficial).

There are phrases here and there that I find evocative. (Notice that I didn't say "charming.") The short sentences without much in the way of punctuation are also a bit infectious, but as a 54-year-old I just can't stand them. I have this terrible habit of picking up the prose style of fiction writers, so I think it's a good idea to donate my copy of the book to the hospital library, and be done with it.