A couple of years ago I wrote this post about my experience working in classical radio.
Back in the 1980s the trend in public radio stations was to play music that was "scientifically designed" to appeal to the suspected audience, and stations tended to play music that was familiar as well as music that was not too long. Back in my radio daze in the 1980s, fresh from Boston and New York, where I cut my teeth (or should it be ears) on the best radio known to man or woman, I built up a library of eclectic music written by relatively little-known composers. All the selections that I programmed for the 30 hours per week of classical music on our radio station were pieces and performances that I really cared about, and towards the end of my radio life we had a large enough library to keep all of our music in about a six month rotation. It was wonderful when people stopped to talk with me in the grocery store to talk about some piece or some performance that had been on the radio that morning. Unfortunately too many of those people are no longer alive, or they have moved away. But I digress.
Since the elimination of classical music from the radio station in my community, I have been listening to the two public radio stations, one to the south, and one to the north, that we can reach in our area. I have been rather impressed over the years with the number of pieces that I have heard that are new to me, even though some of the newer announcers drive me a bit batty with their, misinformation and sometimes unwelcome comments. Then again, I have devoted a good deal of time being critical of radio announcers, both professionally and as an informed and educated musician.
I was particularly struck by one quick comment this morning that an announcer made between pieces and PSAs (which are NPR ads) stating that everyone knows that orchestral musicians make good salaries, particularly in larger cities, but many of them are out of work or have other jobs. Then the announcer pressed a button and happily played some more music. Why did she just drop a statement like that without any further discussion? Was she talking about our area of Illinois where professional musicians have to piece together a living? This may be news to many public radio listeners, and it might be the source of serious emotional turmoil for others. She might as well have said to a different radio audience that steel workers make good salaries, but there are a lot of steel workers who are out of work. I steamed about it for a while, and then drove off to get a headlight replaced (which was why I was in the car in the first place).
The electrical system had to be turned off in order to replace my headlight, so I had to re-set the car's radio buttons after the headlight was replaced. I noticed that both radio stations were playing the exact same Chopin waltz, but at different intervals, which got me excited for a moment. Then I noticed that it sounded like the same performance, which the announcement confirmed. I spent the rest of the drive home trying to figure out who was broadcasting live and who was using a feed--maybe someone was on vacation. Then it dawned on me that those people who I thought were living in one or the other community and were broadcasting the classical music on the NPR stations might be broadcasting it from somewhere else entirely.
Oh how naive I have been! A quick search confirmed that everyone seems to be broadcasting their classical music by way of Minnesota Public Radio. Maybe that radio announcer could have said something about classical radio announcers being out of work. Nah. That would only happen in my own private radio.
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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query radio. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sunday, December 29, 2019
A ramble on this upcoming Beethoven year
Some people are making a big deal of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in December of 2020 with festivals and special programming, and some people are reacting to the hubbub by vowing to avoid listening to Beethoven for the year. While looking for some kind of middle ground in these internets, I found my way to this proposal to spend 2020 listening to a wider variety of music than usual.
Unfortunately everything on this list seems to involve recorded music, and I, as a recovering classical radio professional and CD reviewer, rarely get the kind of pleasure from recorded music that I do from live music. I also rarely derive as much pleasure from hearing other people play a piece of music as I do playing it myself. Following the score while listening to a recording helps. So does watching videos taken from concerts. Sometimes I play along with recordings, but only as a tool to help me learn the viola part of an unfamiliar orchestral piece.
As I grow older I notice that the musicological community has grown younger, and those young musicologists have a formidable presence in these internets. Their mission is (in part) to challenge the status quo, and make a case for more gender equity and racial equity in music. There's nothing wrong with doing that. The world of music is full of people who are biased, egocentric, opportunistic, bigoted, and sexist. It always has been that way, and it will probably always will be. (Beethoven probably had many of the above characteristics.)
When I was in my twenties I thought I knew a lot about music. When I think about how little I know now, I can't imagine how musically "provincial" I must have been as a young person. My musical coming of age coincided with the beginning of the HIP (historically informed performance) movement, and after I learned about the recorder and the baroque flute, I had a goal of only performing pieces of music on the instrument they were intended to be played on. Some of the Handel sonatas, for example, were written to be played on the recorder. That worked for a while, until I got frustrated with the limitations of the repertoire. (It was before musicologists discovered the thousands of pieces of flute music that fell out of print, only to be woken up again with the advent of the Werner Icking Archive and the IMSLP.)
During my twenties and thirties I worked as the person who programmed the music for the local college radio station (four or five hours every day). I was not happy with the state of public radio programming at the time, and was eager, in my innocence, to provide the local radio audience with an alternative. In order to attract and maintain their listeners NPR stations played single movements of pieces rather than entire works. They also played select pieces of music over and over again. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances was big. So was Rhapsody in Blue. There was a moratorium on twelve-tone music, and one on vocal music, so it's no wonder that driving across the country (or at least from Illinois to New Jersey and Boston), I could recognize every piece on the radio. Usually in two or three notes.
Our radio station was different. We played whole pieces. We played vocal music (song cycles during the week, and on Sundays I would often play an opera). Fridays were devoted entirely to early music played on period instruments (and sung, of course). We played new (twentieth-century) music. We played twelve-tone music. We played as much commercially recorded music as we could find that was written by women, as well as concert tapes of new music written by women. Beethoven was in our regular rotation, but we usually played each of his symphonies about once a year. A year would also include a single playing of each of his string quartets and other chamber music, as well as his sonatas.
I felt kind of "cutting edge" at the time because nobody in the "larger world" of radio could get away with the kind of self-indulgent programming that I could get away with. Our station was not part of NPR, and the powers in the University that were in control of the radio station did not do anything to measure listener response. Many of the recordings that went into the station's library were bonus recordings sent to me by the CD reviewing magazine I wrote for (they sent a list every month, and I checked off the things I wanted for the library). I had a friend at Naxos (the father of the vice president), so I got their whole catalog during their early years, and added the recordings to the station's library. The Marco Polo recordings of unusual music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were mind expanding. Every monthly shipment was an education. I would, of course, only allow excellent recordings in the library. Less-than-excellent recordings were (ahem) "traded" in order to pay for expenses (like my salary).
This radio paradise all came to an unfortunate end twenty years ago. At that point I went to graduate school to study composition, and I learned to love Beethoven's string quartets through their viola parts. I also spent a few years learning all of Beethoven's violin sonatas, and performing most of them. I have only played the viola parts of the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh symphonies, along with a handful of overtures, and have played the violin parts of the sixth and seventh. I have played the flute parts of them all (including piccolo in the ninth). I really hope I get a chance to play the viola part in the second, third, eighth, and ninth symphonies before my playing anatomy gives out.
Now that I have reached an age four years after the age that Beethoven ultimately reached, I look forward to this upcoming celebration of his work. My feeling about Beethoven during the past thirty-five years has grown. At first I regarded him as a perhaps over-played composer that I would put in equal rotation with other classical-period composers, and now I believe that he was a remarkable composer who is worthy of all the accolades associated with this 2020 celebration of his work.
You might find these posts about radio and these posts about Beethoven I have made here over the year interesting reading.
Unfortunately everything on this list seems to involve recorded music, and I, as a recovering classical radio professional and CD reviewer, rarely get the kind of pleasure from recorded music that I do from live music. I also rarely derive as much pleasure from hearing other people play a piece of music as I do playing it myself. Following the score while listening to a recording helps. So does watching videos taken from concerts. Sometimes I play along with recordings, but only as a tool to help me learn the viola part of an unfamiliar orchestral piece.
As I grow older I notice that the musicological community has grown younger, and those young musicologists have a formidable presence in these internets. Their mission is (in part) to challenge the status quo, and make a case for more gender equity and racial equity in music. There's nothing wrong with doing that. The world of music is full of people who are biased, egocentric, opportunistic, bigoted, and sexist. It always has been that way, and it will probably always will be. (Beethoven probably had many of the above characteristics.)
When I was in my twenties I thought I knew a lot about music. When I think about how little I know now, I can't imagine how musically "provincial" I must have been as a young person. My musical coming of age coincided with the beginning of the HIP (historically informed performance) movement, and after I learned about the recorder and the baroque flute, I had a goal of only performing pieces of music on the instrument they were intended to be played on. Some of the Handel sonatas, for example, were written to be played on the recorder. That worked for a while, until I got frustrated with the limitations of the repertoire. (It was before musicologists discovered the thousands of pieces of flute music that fell out of print, only to be woken up again with the advent of the Werner Icking Archive and the IMSLP.)
During my twenties and thirties I worked as the person who programmed the music for the local college radio station (four or five hours every day). I was not happy with the state of public radio programming at the time, and was eager, in my innocence, to provide the local radio audience with an alternative. In order to attract and maintain their listeners NPR stations played single movements of pieces rather than entire works. They also played select pieces of music over and over again. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances was big. So was Rhapsody in Blue. There was a moratorium on twelve-tone music, and one on vocal music, so it's no wonder that driving across the country (or at least from Illinois to New Jersey and Boston), I could recognize every piece on the radio. Usually in two or three notes.
Our radio station was different. We played whole pieces. We played vocal music (song cycles during the week, and on Sundays I would often play an opera). Fridays were devoted entirely to early music played on period instruments (and sung, of course). We played new (twentieth-century) music. We played twelve-tone music. We played as much commercially recorded music as we could find that was written by women, as well as concert tapes of new music written by women. Beethoven was in our regular rotation, but we usually played each of his symphonies about once a year. A year would also include a single playing of each of his string quartets and other chamber music, as well as his sonatas.
I felt kind of "cutting edge" at the time because nobody in the "larger world" of radio could get away with the kind of self-indulgent programming that I could get away with. Our station was not part of NPR, and the powers in the University that were in control of the radio station did not do anything to measure listener response. Many of the recordings that went into the station's library were bonus recordings sent to me by the CD reviewing magazine I wrote for (they sent a list every month, and I checked off the things I wanted for the library). I had a friend at Naxos (the father of the vice president), so I got their whole catalog during their early years, and added the recordings to the station's library. The Marco Polo recordings of unusual music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were mind expanding. Every monthly shipment was an education. I would, of course, only allow excellent recordings in the library. Less-than-excellent recordings were (ahem) "traded" in order to pay for expenses (like my salary).
This radio paradise all came to an unfortunate end twenty years ago. At that point I went to graduate school to study composition, and I learned to love Beethoven's string quartets through their viola parts. I also spent a few years learning all of Beethoven's violin sonatas, and performing most of them. I have only played the viola parts of the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh symphonies, along with a handful of overtures, and have played the violin parts of the sixth and seventh. I have played the flute parts of them all (including piccolo in the ninth). I really hope I get a chance to play the viola part in the second, third, eighth, and ninth symphonies before my playing anatomy gives out.
Now that I have reached an age four years after the age that Beethoven ultimately reached, I look forward to this upcoming celebration of his work. My feeling about Beethoven during the past thirty-five years has grown. At first I regarded him as a perhaps over-played composer that I would put in equal rotation with other classical-period composers, and now I believe that he was a remarkable composer who is worthy of all the accolades associated with this 2020 celebration of his work.
You might find these posts about radio and these posts about Beethoven I have made here over the year interesting reading.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
A Radio Moment
When I worked as a radio announcer, I would sometimes have what I call "radio moments." They were moments of coincidence. A big one for me was when I had Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 59 #3 in one CD player (let the video load to :52), and Jean-Féry Rebel's "Les Elements" queued up in another. If you put the above links in different tabs or windows and play the first two chords of each one after the other, you will notice a bit of cosmic nifty-ness.
Another "radio moment" happened after teaching a class on Richard Strauss, who was not mentioned at all in the edition of our textbook that I was using (the textbook editor has since repaired the glaring omission). When I got in the car and turned on the radio, I heard an obscure neo-classical piece on the radio that turned out to be by Strauss.
Anyway, my radio moment today was with Wagner. I turned on my car radio shortly after the beginning of a very engaging performance of the overture to Tannhäuser. I noticed dynamic contrasts and textures in this recording I had never noticed in other recordings, and I started thinking about Daniel Barenboim, and what he had to say about conducting Wagner in Music Quickens Time.
Another "radio moment" happened after teaching a class on Richard Strauss, who was not mentioned at all in the edition of our textbook that I was using (the textbook editor has since repaired the glaring omission). When I got in the car and turned on the radio, I heard an obscure neo-classical piece on the radio that turned out to be by Strauss.
Anyway, my radio moment today was with Wagner. I turned on my car radio shortly after the beginning of a very engaging performance of the overture to Tannhäuser. I noticed dynamic contrasts and textures in this recording I had never noticed in other recordings, and I started thinking about Daniel Barenboim, and what he had to say about conducting Wagner in Music Quickens Time.
It is essential to understand the difference between power and force, which is related to the distinction between volume and intensity in music: when a musician is told to play with greater intensity, his first reaction is to play louder. In fact, the opposite is required: the lower the volume, the greater the need for intensity; the greater the volume, the less the need for intensity. The effect produced by the huge outpouring of sound in Beethoven or Wagner is much greater when the sound is not forcefully controlled every step of the way, but rather allowed to grow organically, its natural, inherent power being the result of gradually accumulating strength. The build-up and release of tension are central to the expression of music. Thus even the most powerful chord should be played so that it allows the inner voices to be heard; otherwise it lacks tension and depends exclusively on brutal, aggressive force. One must be able to hear the opposition, the notes that oppose the main idea.After the piece was over, the announcer told me (and the rest of the listening audience) that the performance was by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
My Own Private Radio
I used to work at a college radio station. I was called the classical music drector, and I was responsible for building a classical record (I started working there in 1986) and CD library, teaching students how to pronounce the names of composers and performers, making programs, and spending a bunch of time on the air myself.
It happened that the university held a special workshop with Karl Haas, back in the days when the university in the town where I live invited classical musicians and people connected with the classical music world to campus.
I was a novice at radio, and I spent most of my time learning on the job. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I was asked to do a radio interview with Karl Haas. I had been interviewed a few times, but I never actually conducted an interview before. I found Mr. Haas charming, and we got along just fine. When I confessed to him that I had never done an interview before, he told me that it was best not to talk too much before we got on the air or the interview would suffer. Once we were were in the studio and the microphone went on, Karl Haas changed from a medium baritone to a bass baritone. I believe we talked very frankly about music, but he was in total control of the interview. I learned everything I needed to know about classical radio from those thirty minutes.
Now that I am older and maybe a little bit wiser, I would love to be able to interview him again, but he is no longer alive, and my radio days ended when the university radio station abandoned its classical music programming.
It happened that the university held a special workshop with Karl Haas, back in the days when the university in the town where I live invited classical musicians and people connected with the classical music world to campus.
I was a novice at radio, and I spent most of my time learning on the job. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I was asked to do a radio interview with Karl Haas. I had been interviewed a few times, but I never actually conducted an interview before. I found Mr. Haas charming, and we got along just fine. When I confessed to him that I had never done an interview before, he told me that it was best not to talk too much before we got on the air or the interview would suffer. Once we were were in the studio and the microphone went on, Karl Haas changed from a medium baritone to a bass baritone. I believe we talked very frankly about music, but he was in total control of the interview. I learned everything I needed to know about classical radio from those thirty minutes.
Now that I am older and maybe a little bit wiser, I would love to be able to interview him again, but he is no longer alive, and my radio days ended when the university radio station abandoned its classical music programming.
Saturday, January 28, 2023
A Watched Pot . . .
Observation for the day: a watched pot may never seem to boil, but an unwatched pot always boils over.
I would consider the magic of crossing the top of the pot with a wooden spoon as a kind of "pot watching." It is like engaging a pot watcher while you are off chopping vegetables, grating cheese, cleaning counters, washing dishes, and other multi-tasky, kitcheny things.
I have been thinking about the way this observation could apply to things in musical life. Those of us who practice an instrument diligently tend to "watch the pot," hoping for all of the physical work we do to amount to some kind of fluency in a passage over a matter of minutes. But I find that after practicing a passage carefully for a while, and then taking time away from it, I can come back to the passage at hand with a refreshed sense of physical balance and a less-cluttered mind. And then I wonder why it was once so hard.
Those of us who were in a hurry to grow up as children or as teenagers felt that time moved slowly. Perhaps because we were so busy "watching the pot." But time progresses at the same rate whether you are watching or not. And in musical terms "boiling over" is not a bad thing at all. Unlike water, which has a specific boiling point, musical expression, in all its varieties, is limitless.
I wonder if some of us "watch the pot" when it comes to relationships with friends, students, and young people in real physical time, wondering where a relationship might "go," if a student will "get it," or waiting for a child to grow into a pair of shoes that were still too big. And is the anticipation of a future event (a birthday, a party, the beginning of school, graduation from school) an act of "pot watching?"
I find great joy in filling time paying attention to details when reading a book, writing music (or blog posts), playing chamber music, listening to a concert, or talking with friends. It would be nice to employ the time-altering features of pot watching to give certain moments lasting weight, but time flows on, and consciously preserving moments in is not something I can control.
Sometimes when I am writing music I am able to create an illusion of a pitch or phrase lasting longer than it actually does in measured time. When that happens I celebrate, but I don't actually know how to make such moments happen. Minimalist-style repetition is one tool (trick), but it doesn't work in every musical context.
With our electric stove we need to during the dial to "high" to start the burner "burning." Then you can turn it down (unless you forget). Fortunately life itself doesn't always have to be propelled by high heat. We have the option of turning down the flame to keep things at a nice simmer, which can help us to savor special moments.
I have found that one of the benefits of age is the ability to appreciate moderation in some things, including savoring slow progress. I used to be in such a hurry, and I missed a great deal because I wasn't paying enough attention. I'm trying to do better.
But now, in the age of the internet, it is challenging to keep the heat low, to pay full attention, and to feel comfortable with moderation.
The saying goes, Dance like no one is watching." But when the dance floor is on line, it is hard to dance as if no one is watching, because our hope is that someone might be watching. And when it seems that nobody is "watching" (reading, listening, playing, or even caring) it is disheartening.
I remember during my years at the radio station I wondered if anyone was listening. In the mid 1980s our station was the strongest public radio station (for forty miles in all directions) in the small area of the FM dial allotted to non-commercial radio. (That was before a local Christian radio station started broadcasting with a strong signal that made our signal harder to get.)
But every once in a while, a good twenty plus years since I stopped my life as a "radio broadcast professional," people in town tell me how much they enjoyed my radio programs. And every once in a while I get a note or a recording from somebody who has enjoyed playing something I wrote, and I find that my cup is full and even overflowing.
I would consider the magic of crossing the top of the pot with a wooden spoon as a kind of "pot watching." It is like engaging a pot watcher while you are off chopping vegetables, grating cheese, cleaning counters, washing dishes, and other multi-tasky, kitcheny things.
I have been thinking about the way this observation could apply to things in musical life. Those of us who practice an instrument diligently tend to "watch the pot," hoping for all of the physical work we do to amount to some kind of fluency in a passage over a matter of minutes. But I find that after practicing a passage carefully for a while, and then taking time away from it, I can come back to the passage at hand with a refreshed sense of physical balance and a less-cluttered mind. And then I wonder why it was once so hard.
Those of us who were in a hurry to grow up as children or as teenagers felt that time moved slowly. Perhaps because we were so busy "watching the pot." But time progresses at the same rate whether you are watching or not. And in musical terms "boiling over" is not a bad thing at all. Unlike water, which has a specific boiling point, musical expression, in all its varieties, is limitless.
I wonder if some of us "watch the pot" when it comes to relationships with friends, students, and young people in real physical time, wondering where a relationship might "go," if a student will "get it," or waiting for a child to grow into a pair of shoes that were still too big. And is the anticipation of a future event (a birthday, a party, the beginning of school, graduation from school) an act of "pot watching?"
I find great joy in filling time paying attention to details when reading a book, writing music (or blog posts), playing chamber music, listening to a concert, or talking with friends. It would be nice to employ the time-altering features of pot watching to give certain moments lasting weight, but time flows on, and consciously preserving moments in is not something I can control.
Sometimes when I am writing music I am able to create an illusion of a pitch or phrase lasting longer than it actually does in measured time. When that happens I celebrate, but I don't actually know how to make such moments happen. Minimalist-style repetition is one tool (trick), but it doesn't work in every musical context.
With our electric stove we need to during the dial to "high" to start the burner "burning." Then you can turn it down (unless you forget). Fortunately life itself doesn't always have to be propelled by high heat. We have the option of turning down the flame to keep things at a nice simmer, which can help us to savor special moments.
I have found that one of the benefits of age is the ability to appreciate moderation in some things, including savoring slow progress. I used to be in such a hurry, and I missed a great deal because I wasn't paying enough attention. I'm trying to do better.
But now, in the age of the internet, it is challenging to keep the heat low, to pay full attention, and to feel comfortable with moderation.
The saying goes, Dance like no one is watching." But when the dance floor is on line, it is hard to dance as if no one is watching, because our hope is that someone might be watching. And when it seems that nobody is "watching" (reading, listening, playing, or even caring) it is disheartening.
I remember during my years at the radio station I wondered if anyone was listening. In the mid 1980s our station was the strongest public radio station (for forty miles in all directions) in the small area of the FM dial allotted to non-commercial radio. (That was before a local Christian radio station started broadcasting with a strong signal that made our signal harder to get.)
But every once in a while, a good twenty plus years since I stopped my life as a "radio broadcast professional," people in town tell me how much they enjoyed my radio programs. And every once in a while I get a note or a recording from somebody who has enjoyed playing something I wrote, and I find that my cup is full and even overflowing.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Confessions of a Recovering Recovered CD Reviewer
I suppose that during the 23 twenty years I spent as a CD reviewer for the American Record Guide, my opinions about music were valid. I did listen carefully to all of the recordings I received, and I did always try to write statements that were true. How I managed write more than 50 reviews every year is a mystery to me.
I started reviewing while I working at the local university's radio station. During the Thanksgiving break of 1992, Michael and I went to the library to get a bunch of periodicals to read over the break. With a faculty card he could take periodicals out for more than one day. I remember that I got a few copies of The Strad and several issues of the American Record Guide, which I had never read.
I took issue with an essay written by the editor concerning "historically informed performance," and wrote him a long letter. He wrote back saying, "Too bad you can't write for us." I wrote back asking why I couldn't. A few weeks later a box of flute CDs and a style sheet arrived by mail. After a few months I asked if I could (please) have recordings other than flute recordings to review, and I became one of the chamber music reviewers.
I used to play the recordings I received to review on the air, where I could listen using high-quality speakers. It was actually an ideal situation because our (very small and underfunded) radio station could finally play brand new recordings of often unusual repertoire, providing an alternative to the repertoire of classical “hits” played by the other classical stations (well, we were classical in the morning) in our listening area. I donated some of the review copies to the station's library, and I put them into regular rotation, which made our library current and good (my goal for the radio station library was to have only excellent recordings to play). The writing, which took far more time than the listening, was something that I generally did at home, while raising two children and trying to learn to play a new instrument.
In 2000, when I left the radio station and went to graduate school (with a "grading" assistantship), things became far more difficult. I listened using headphones and a portable CD player, and I had to sandwich my review writing between marathon exam grading sessions and general graduate school work, in addition to composing and practicing. I suppose it was good practice for my days teaching music appreciation (which I was doing concurrently with private teaching and freelance orchestral playing, not to mention practicing and composing).
There were a few years when I also worked as the advertising manager for the magazine, a job that I wasn't at all cut out for, and it was then that I realized how much I disliked the whole business aspect of recordings. I was a little embarrassed when things I wrote in the ARG as "FINE" were quoted on people's websites and on CD covers. People also treated me differently when I was a reviewer. Famous people called me. Really.
I also had a CD storage problem, and an American Record Guide issue storage problem (we reviewers were supposed to make reference to old reviews). I dispensed with the plastic CD cases, and kept the CDs in large loose-leaf binders. Those still took up a great deal of shelf space. Since I rarely listened to those CDs for pleasure, they mostly sat there.
I stopped writing for the ARG a few years ago. I moved the books of CDs to the garage, where they sit undisturbed. I cut out the pages in the ARG issues that had my reviews, and put those pages in a zipped binder where they sit in the garage, next to the CD binders. I might even throw them away one of these days.
I mostly listen to live music now, and have made a point of going to more concerts. I do sometimes listen to music on the radio when I am in the car, and I do listen on YouTube now and again. Now that I don't have to make judgements about what I hear, I have a far greater appreciation for music than ever before.
I started reviewing while I working at the local university's radio station. During the Thanksgiving break of 1992, Michael and I went to the library to get a bunch of periodicals to read over the break. With a faculty card he could take periodicals out for more than one day. I remember that I got a few copies of The Strad and several issues of the American Record Guide, which I had never read.
I took issue with an essay written by the editor concerning "historically informed performance," and wrote him a long letter. He wrote back saying, "Too bad you can't write for us." I wrote back asking why I couldn't. A few weeks later a box of flute CDs and a style sheet arrived by mail. After a few months I asked if I could (please) have recordings other than flute recordings to review, and I became one of the chamber music reviewers.
I used to play the recordings I received to review on the air, where I could listen using high-quality speakers. It was actually an ideal situation because our (very small and underfunded) radio station could finally play brand new recordings of often unusual repertoire, providing an alternative to the repertoire of classical “hits” played by the other classical stations (well, we were classical in the morning) in our listening area. I donated some of the review copies to the station's library, and I put them into regular rotation, which made our library current and good (my goal for the radio station library was to have only excellent recordings to play). The writing, which took far more time than the listening, was something that I generally did at home, while raising two children and trying to learn to play a new instrument.
In 2000, when I left the radio station and went to graduate school (with a "grading" assistantship), things became far more difficult. I listened using headphones and a portable CD player, and I had to sandwich my review writing between marathon exam grading sessions and general graduate school work, in addition to composing and practicing. I suppose it was good practice for my days teaching music appreciation (which I was doing concurrently with private teaching and freelance orchestral playing, not to mention practicing and composing).
There were a few years when I also worked as the advertising manager for the magazine, a job that I wasn't at all cut out for, and it was then that I realized how much I disliked the whole business aspect of recordings. I was a little embarrassed when things I wrote in the ARG as "FINE" were quoted on people's websites and on CD covers. People also treated me differently when I was a reviewer. Famous people called me. Really.
I also had a CD storage problem, and an American Record Guide issue storage problem (we reviewers were supposed to make reference to old reviews). I dispensed with the plastic CD cases, and kept the CDs in large loose-leaf binders. Those still took up a great deal of shelf space. Since I rarely listened to those CDs for pleasure, they mostly sat there.
I stopped writing for the ARG a few years ago. I moved the books of CDs to the garage, where they sit undisturbed. I cut out the pages in the ARG issues that had my reviews, and put those pages in a zipped binder where they sit in the garage, next to the CD binders. I might even throw them away one of these days.
I mostly listen to live music now, and have made a point of going to more concerts. I do sometimes listen to music on the radio when I am in the car, and I do listen on YouTube now and again. Now that I don't have to make judgements about what I hear, I have a far greater appreciation for music than ever before.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Marketing Music
I remember back in the winter of 1994 reading an AP article in our local (small midwestern town) paper that a recording of Gregorian Chant performed by the Benedictine monks from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos was on the top of the pop charts in Spain. The story, as I recall, mentioned that a DJ at a pop radio station decided to put a recording of Gregorian Chant on the air during rush hour, and the response was tremendous. People who were normally frazzled were somehow lulled into a state of religious calm.
I was working at a radio station at the time, and I knew that the only way a recording of Gregorian Chant could make it into a pop radio station was if it was sent there gratis from either a record company or a record distributing company. I think that promoting the "Chant" recording was a way for Angel Records to test the waters for marketing. The very smart marketing people behind this particular frenzy might have had certain controls to work with for their particular marketing challenge:
I wonder how Gorecki’s Third Symphony made it to #3 on the British pop charts in 1991, and I wonder if Angel was following Nonesuch's marketing strategy--or testing it.
I was working at a radio station at the time, and I knew that the only way a recording of Gregorian Chant could make it into a pop radio station was if it was sent there gratis from either a record company or a record distributing company. I think that promoting the "Chant" recording was a way for Angel Records to test the waters for marketing. The very smart marketing people behind this particular frenzy might have had certain controls to work with for their particular marketing challenge:
1. Find something really old and would be completely unfamiliar to the pop audience. It could even be something religious.This marketing scheme actually paved the way for the then "new age" audience of twenty-somethings that embraced (and bought recordings of) the music of Hildegard von Bingen (produced by Angel, by the way), and for groups of monks to come out with their own far-superior recordings of Gregorian Chant. But isn't it odd that these resulting frecordings of Gregorian Chant made on record labels other than Angel Records never hit the pop charts or sold millions of copies?
2. Make sure that the music is in the public domain so that nobody needs to be paid royalties when the profits come rolling in. How about monks in a monestary?
3. Give it a one-word title and a catchy cover that combines the far-away sacred with the eternally hip mystery of Rene Magritte.
4. Don't spend any money. Use only the media, particulary the international news media, to promote it. Make up stories if you have to. Send copies to pop radio stations all over Spain. Call the DJs at the pop radio stations and encourage them to give it airplay. Assume that they will judge the record by its hip cover. Let reports of the recording's odd popularity raise people's curiosity. Who cares if they ever listen to it again after buying it?
I wonder how Gorecki’s Third Symphony made it to #3 on the British pop charts in 1991, and I wonder if Angel was following Nonesuch's marketing strategy--or testing it.
Tags:
Saturday, August 07, 2010
They don't let me out very often: things I learned on my summer vacation
Since Michael and I live such a bucolic life in our year-round vacation home in Illinois, our summer vacations away tend to be one-week-long over-stimulation festivals, bookended by dawn-to-dusk driving. We do the same thing every year: see family and close friends in New Jersey, Boston, and New York. It is basically a "same time next year" affair, yet each year is distinctly different.
We saw signs (complete with actual signs) of the Recovery Act everywhere. There were projects in progress, and smooth-riding evidence that projects had been completed. The construction projects on I 70 didn't cause any real delays for us, though going slowly through the awesome bridge building projects is actually a pleasure. The delays on I 80 were not very pleasurable, but they could have been much worse (they were for the westbound travelers.)
We also saw even more signs of kindness among the inhabitants of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and its West Village than we noticed during our last visit to the city. The bustle and commerce of the West Village, and the renovation of Chelsea Market (and the awesome transformation of an elevated railway into an urban park) makes me reconsider the merits of capitalism. Here's a picture of me and Seymour Barab, my favorite inhabitant of the Upper East Side.
And here's a photo of me with Seymour's wife, Margie King, my other favorite Upper East Side inhabitant:
Boston and its suburbs have become much more international. What a treat it was to sit in a coffee shop and hear two sets of conversations in two different languages (I understood neither one). New York also seemed a lot more international than I remember it being, and the expansion of the term "International" from the European-dominated 20th-century into the fully global 21st is very exciting.
It also seems that classical radio has improved greatly over the past year. In Ohio and Pennsylvania there were actual live in-house radio announcers, who played interesting music. There was a recording of the Prokofiev Classical Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Ormandy, and a recording of the Schoenberg transcription of Johann Strauss' "Roses from the South" played by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players (I got to hear my father's famous pa pa coming after each um). There was even some vocal music on the radio: some Byrd performed by Chanticleer, that was on a program that followed Phil Schaap's week-long dissection under a microscope (with lots of repetition) of one day in the life of Charlie Parker (I think it was February 11, 1949). Too bad the Columbia University student who announced the Byrd didn't say anything about the Byrd-Bird connection. Who could pass up a radio moment like that?
Eight things I learned this year:
1. Old friends and old friendships get better with time and age.
2. Places change, and sometimes they change for the better. Progress is often a good thing.
3. Classical radio is still alive and well, and it seems to be sharing an audience with Jazz in some places.
4. Whole Foods makes the most extraordinary baked sesame tofu, and it makes terrific picnic food.
5. It is possible to travel well without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant, as long as you bring a large insulated cooler bag on your journey.
6. It is preferable to travel (as long as the weather is good) without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant.
7. Just because a museum is famous and highly regarded, you can't count on it to exhibit contemporary art that is worthy of the visibility.
8. It really doesn't matter anyway, because so much of New York's art is not found in museums: it's found on the streets and in the people.
We saw signs (complete with actual signs) of the Recovery Act everywhere. There were projects in progress, and smooth-riding evidence that projects had been completed. The construction projects on I 70 didn't cause any real delays for us, though going slowly through the awesome bridge building projects is actually a pleasure. The delays on I 80 were not very pleasurable, but they could have been much worse (they were for the westbound travelers.)We also saw even more signs of kindness among the inhabitants of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and its West Village than we noticed during our last visit to the city. The bustle and commerce of the West Village, and the renovation of Chelsea Market (and the awesome transformation of an elevated railway into an urban park) makes me reconsider the merits of capitalism. Here's a picture of me and Seymour Barab, my favorite inhabitant of the Upper East Side.
And here's a photo of me with Seymour's wife, Margie King, my other favorite Upper East Side inhabitant:
Boston and its suburbs have become much more international. What a treat it was to sit in a coffee shop and hear two sets of conversations in two different languages (I understood neither one). New York also seemed a lot more international than I remember it being, and the expansion of the term "International" from the European-dominated 20th-century into the fully global 21st is very exciting.
It also seems that classical radio has improved greatly over the past year. In Ohio and Pennsylvania there were actual live in-house radio announcers, who played interesting music. There was a recording of the Prokofiev Classical Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Ormandy, and a recording of the Schoenberg transcription of Johann Strauss' "Roses from the South" played by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players (I got to hear my father's famous pa pa coming after each um). There was even some vocal music on the radio: some Byrd performed by Chanticleer, that was on a program that followed Phil Schaap's week-long dissection under a microscope (with lots of repetition) of one day in the life of Charlie Parker (I think it was February 11, 1949). Too bad the Columbia University student who announced the Byrd didn't say anything about the Byrd-Bird connection. Who could pass up a radio moment like that?
Eight things I learned this year:
1. Old friends and old friendships get better with time and age.
2. Places change, and sometimes they change for the better. Progress is often a good thing.
3. Classical radio is still alive and well, and it seems to be sharing an audience with Jazz in some places.
4. Whole Foods makes the most extraordinary baked sesame tofu, and it makes terrific picnic food.
5. It is possible to travel well without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant, as long as you bring a large insulated cooler bag on your journey.
6. It is preferable to travel (as long as the weather is good) without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant.
7. Just because a museum is famous and highly regarded, you can't count on it to exhibit contemporary art that is worthy of the visibility.
8. It really doesn't matter anyway, because so much of New York's art is not found in museums: it's found on the streets and in the people.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Rebuilding the Audience for Classical Music
The musical world as we see it today is a mass of contradictions. The level of technical musicianship among young people today is extraordinarily high because we have so many well-trained teachers. Thirty years ago students of popular instruments considering serious music study had between ten and twenty fine teachers to choose from who where teaching in prestigious colleges and conservatories (less popular instruments like the oboe, for example, had fewer teachers). Now students have hundreds of competent (and often excellent) teachers to choose from teaching at all kinds of colleges (including affordable state universities) who take extraordinary pride in their teaching, knowing that their own opportunities as soloists are severely limited by the lack of demand for soloists and orchestral musicians in the music market.
Many of these students, especially the string players, had the benefit of Suzuki training, which, when taught properly, can lead the way to the development of a fine technique at an early age. Music has enriched the lives of many of these students, and many choose to pursue music as a career because it is what they love most. Many believe that music provides a valid contribution to society. They are supported by their parents, their teachers, and their school community, but when they find themselves in the “real world” it becomes clear that during the years that they were developing as musicians their peers were becoming increasingly unaware of the value of music, especially live music.
The formal study of music education as a discipline is alive and well within colleges and universities. There are whole courses of study devoted to pedagogy—how to teach, and the school systems that still value instrumental and choral music programs as vital components of their plan for education benefit from band directors and choir directors with training far superior to band directors from previous generations.
For the informed music listener we live in a time of virtual paradise. Recordings are available of just about every piece by the composers we consider “major” composers, and recordings are available of the complete works of composers we might consider “minor” composers. Recordings are available by composers we have only read about in history books, and recordings are available by composers who only appear in footnotes in history books. If a recording is not available of a piece, it is quite easy to make a recording of exceptional quality, duplicate it professionally, and make it available to the whole world by way of the internet.
Many musicians who saw the difficulty of pursuing a performing career as the gates of musical opportunity were beginning to close in the 1970s and 1980s, devoted their passion for music to the study of musicology. These scholars have made extraordinary discoveries concerning performance practice of early music and connections between music and society. There are very few subjects concerning musicology that extremely smart scholars haven’t written something about, though the current musicological journals are far more limited in their scope these days because the agendas of academic musical scholarship have moved away (temporarily, I hope) from the substance of music itself. Virtually all published musical scholarship is available to anyone with a library card through the interlibrary loan system.
Other musicians found their true calling in instrument making. We now have exponentially more fine instrument makers than we had 30 years ago. It is now possible to special order an instrument made to exact specifications: a duplicate of a historical instrument, an instrument with a specific ergonomic shape to help ease stress on the body, an instrument made out of a specific material or made to play at a specific pitch. There are student string instruments being made that are extremely affordable, and bows made of synthetic material that play as well as bows made of rare rainforest woods. Many of the makers of these instruments are able to make a living because they can advertise their trade in widely-read music publications and on the internet. They are accessible from anywhere in the world so they can have their workshops in places that allow more space and require lower rents than they would have in major cities.
Music has made its way into the smaller cities of America. There are excellent community orchestras in smaller cities all over the country, and there are ample opportunities to hear concerts in places where parking is not a problem. Now children living more than 100 miles from a major city can get the same quality of musical training as children living in major cities. Many parents who have fled the city to raise their children in a more peaceful and less stressful environment support the teaching studios of thousands of private teachers living in smaller cities and towns because they believe that the study of music is beneficial for the overall development of their children.
What is wrong with this picture? In a way these developments represent an ideal situation for music to continue to grow and thrive in this country, but one major component of the musical ecosystem is missing. Somehow while we were teaching our musicians to play better, teach better, and think about music in new ways, we have lost our audience.
The thriving audience for music in America during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century didn’t just happen. It had to be built. A young America built squarely on industrialism had a generation of wealthy children who wanted to bring attributes of European culture to America. They imported musicians from France and Germany, built concert halls, and provided the necessary funding for professional symphony orchestras to begin giving concerts. When America started to “grow” its own soloists (like the violinists Albert Spaulding and Maud Powell) and its own composers (like George Gershwin) it was a major cultural accomplishment for the entire population, even those people who did not live in major cities. After the Homestead Act, high schools in the West made sure to include music in their courses of study. Appreciation of the arts went hand in glove with a well-rounded education when America was creating itself.
The piano industry also found its strongest market in America. Pianos could be delivered by train to any city with a train station. People played piano for recreation and entertainment, and people had an increased interest in hearing the instrument played well.
As political situations became more difficult for European musicians during the years of the two World Wars, more and more musicians from Europe immigrated to America, and America enjoyed its greatest musical times. Along with this gift of talent from Europe came the need to understand it, so many people put themselves to the task of educating the public through publications, lectures, concerts, and recordings. Maud Powell’s recordings were originally intended to introduce people in the remote American cities where she toured to the music that she was planning to play during her visits. Early recordings were never intended to replace live performances, but rather to remind and inform people about music.
Radio became a vibrant stage for music. Radio stations had their own orchestras, and a large body of first-rate musicians made their living playing on the radio. Many first performances of important musical works happened in live radio broadcasts. Radio brought music into every home in America. Because of the quality of the broadcasts and the importance of music to the people who ran the programs, the radio became vitally important in the musical education of America.
Early television was booming with musical talent. The original talk show host Jack Paar regularly had the pianist Oscar Levant as a guest on his show. Harpo Marx was seriously interested in music (though he never learned to read and played the harp backwards). Fred Rogers was a composer before he began his work on children’s television, and wrote many operas for children using the puppets in his neighborhood. The musical climate of Southern California was so lively that the violinist Jascha Heifetz chose to live there until the end of his life.
Early television put a great deal of effort into music education, and Leonard Bernstein’s educational television programs introduced thousands and thousands of people to music. His Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic became a model for many orchestras to follow. Bernstein, who received his musical education later in life than many professional musicians, understood the importance of early exposure and to music and also the importance of speaking to the intelligence of young people instead of pandering to their need for entertainment. His audience became the audience of music lovers that supported American orchestras and chamber music ensembles into the 1970s.
Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the education system, and by the end of the 1970s every state in American made drastic cuts to their music programs. It is possible that people assumed that the audience for live classical music would remain strong, or it is possible that at that time American society was so twisted and confused that these cuts were made without any thought at all about the cultural cost that the country would pay for reducing music programs.
It is sort of like exposing only the students who have a genuine interest in writing fiction to reading. Our music education programs have failed in educating a whole generation of people who have put what could have developed into a love for the music played by their peers into other things. Now this generation of people in their thirties and forties who have never been taught to listen to music with any depth fail to see the importance of music in our society, and these people are making financial decisions that end up destroying musical institutions simply because they don’t know what they are doing.
If we want to continue to have live art music (the word “classical” implies music from a limited range of styles) alive in our society we need to change the way it is presented to students in schools. We need to teach students to love listening to music as an activity in itself. We need to involve them in the ritual of concert-going and teach them the beauty of allowing the emotional “meaning” of the music that they hear touch them. They need to hear people play in concerts and they need to learn that their participation in a musical experience as a member of an audience is as vital as the participation of the people playing.
We need to sensitize young people to the emotional range of music making, and teach them to appreciate the fact that one musician’s interpretation of a composer’s work can be wildly different from another musician’s interpretation and still have validity and meaning. We need to teach all of our audiences to listen carefully to the musicians who live in their cities and towns and support the work they do. The quality of a musical performance has no relation to the price of a ticket, but it does depend on an intelligent audience.
The financial burden of supporting musical organizations has been carried by relatively few members of our society. If we succeed in developing a large and vital audience for music to balance our large and vital population of performing musicians, and those people each contribute a small share to the economy that supports live music we might find ourselves living in the best of all musical worlds.
Many of these students, especially the string players, had the benefit of Suzuki training, which, when taught properly, can lead the way to the development of a fine technique at an early age. Music has enriched the lives of many of these students, and many choose to pursue music as a career because it is what they love most. Many believe that music provides a valid contribution to society. They are supported by their parents, their teachers, and their school community, but when they find themselves in the “real world” it becomes clear that during the years that they were developing as musicians their peers were becoming increasingly unaware of the value of music, especially live music.
The formal study of music education as a discipline is alive and well within colleges and universities. There are whole courses of study devoted to pedagogy—how to teach, and the school systems that still value instrumental and choral music programs as vital components of their plan for education benefit from band directors and choir directors with training far superior to band directors from previous generations.
For the informed music listener we live in a time of virtual paradise. Recordings are available of just about every piece by the composers we consider “major” composers, and recordings are available of the complete works of composers we might consider “minor” composers. Recordings are available by composers we have only read about in history books, and recordings are available by composers who only appear in footnotes in history books. If a recording is not available of a piece, it is quite easy to make a recording of exceptional quality, duplicate it professionally, and make it available to the whole world by way of the internet.
Many musicians who saw the difficulty of pursuing a performing career as the gates of musical opportunity were beginning to close in the 1970s and 1980s, devoted their passion for music to the study of musicology. These scholars have made extraordinary discoveries concerning performance practice of early music and connections between music and society. There are very few subjects concerning musicology that extremely smart scholars haven’t written something about, though the current musicological journals are far more limited in their scope these days because the agendas of academic musical scholarship have moved away (temporarily, I hope) from the substance of music itself. Virtually all published musical scholarship is available to anyone with a library card through the interlibrary loan system.
Other musicians found their true calling in instrument making. We now have exponentially more fine instrument makers than we had 30 years ago. It is now possible to special order an instrument made to exact specifications: a duplicate of a historical instrument, an instrument with a specific ergonomic shape to help ease stress on the body, an instrument made out of a specific material or made to play at a specific pitch. There are student string instruments being made that are extremely affordable, and bows made of synthetic material that play as well as bows made of rare rainforest woods. Many of the makers of these instruments are able to make a living because they can advertise their trade in widely-read music publications and on the internet. They are accessible from anywhere in the world so they can have their workshops in places that allow more space and require lower rents than they would have in major cities.
Music has made its way into the smaller cities of America. There are excellent community orchestras in smaller cities all over the country, and there are ample opportunities to hear concerts in places where parking is not a problem. Now children living more than 100 miles from a major city can get the same quality of musical training as children living in major cities. Many parents who have fled the city to raise their children in a more peaceful and less stressful environment support the teaching studios of thousands of private teachers living in smaller cities and towns because they believe that the study of music is beneficial for the overall development of their children.
What is wrong with this picture? In a way these developments represent an ideal situation for music to continue to grow and thrive in this country, but one major component of the musical ecosystem is missing. Somehow while we were teaching our musicians to play better, teach better, and think about music in new ways, we have lost our audience.
The thriving audience for music in America during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century didn’t just happen. It had to be built. A young America built squarely on industrialism had a generation of wealthy children who wanted to bring attributes of European culture to America. They imported musicians from France and Germany, built concert halls, and provided the necessary funding for professional symphony orchestras to begin giving concerts. When America started to “grow” its own soloists (like the violinists Albert Spaulding and Maud Powell) and its own composers (like George Gershwin) it was a major cultural accomplishment for the entire population, even those people who did not live in major cities. After the Homestead Act, high schools in the West made sure to include music in their courses of study. Appreciation of the arts went hand in glove with a well-rounded education when America was creating itself.
The piano industry also found its strongest market in America. Pianos could be delivered by train to any city with a train station. People played piano for recreation and entertainment, and people had an increased interest in hearing the instrument played well.
As political situations became more difficult for European musicians during the years of the two World Wars, more and more musicians from Europe immigrated to America, and America enjoyed its greatest musical times. Along with this gift of talent from Europe came the need to understand it, so many people put themselves to the task of educating the public through publications, lectures, concerts, and recordings. Maud Powell’s recordings were originally intended to introduce people in the remote American cities where she toured to the music that she was planning to play during her visits. Early recordings were never intended to replace live performances, but rather to remind and inform people about music.
Radio became a vibrant stage for music. Radio stations had their own orchestras, and a large body of first-rate musicians made their living playing on the radio. Many first performances of important musical works happened in live radio broadcasts. Radio brought music into every home in America. Because of the quality of the broadcasts and the importance of music to the people who ran the programs, the radio became vitally important in the musical education of America.
Early television was booming with musical talent. The original talk show host Jack Paar regularly had the pianist Oscar Levant as a guest on his show. Harpo Marx was seriously interested in music (though he never learned to read and played the harp backwards). Fred Rogers was a composer before he began his work on children’s television, and wrote many operas for children using the puppets in his neighborhood. The musical climate of Southern California was so lively that the violinist Jascha Heifetz chose to live there until the end of his life.
Early television put a great deal of effort into music education, and Leonard Bernstein’s educational television programs introduced thousands and thousands of people to music. His Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic became a model for many orchestras to follow. Bernstein, who received his musical education later in life than many professional musicians, understood the importance of early exposure and to music and also the importance of speaking to the intelligence of young people instead of pandering to their need for entertainment. His audience became the audience of music lovers that supported American orchestras and chamber music ensembles into the 1970s.
Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the education system, and by the end of the 1970s every state in American made drastic cuts to their music programs. It is possible that people assumed that the audience for live classical music would remain strong, or it is possible that at that time American society was so twisted and confused that these cuts were made without any thought at all about the cultural cost that the country would pay for reducing music programs.
It is sort of like exposing only the students who have a genuine interest in writing fiction to reading. Our music education programs have failed in educating a whole generation of people who have put what could have developed into a love for the music played by their peers into other things. Now this generation of people in their thirties and forties who have never been taught to listen to music with any depth fail to see the importance of music in our society, and these people are making financial decisions that end up destroying musical institutions simply because they don’t know what they are doing.
If we want to continue to have live art music (the word “classical” implies music from a limited range of styles) alive in our society we need to change the way it is presented to students in schools. We need to teach students to love listening to music as an activity in itself. We need to involve them in the ritual of concert-going and teach them the beauty of allowing the emotional “meaning” of the music that they hear touch them. They need to hear people play in concerts and they need to learn that their participation in a musical experience as a member of an audience is as vital as the participation of the people playing.
We need to sensitize young people to the emotional range of music making, and teach them to appreciate the fact that one musician’s interpretation of a composer’s work can be wildly different from another musician’s interpretation and still have validity and meaning. We need to teach all of our audiences to listen carefully to the musicians who live in their cities and towns and support the work they do. The quality of a musical performance has no relation to the price of a ticket, but it does depend on an intelligent audience.
The financial burden of supporting musical organizations has been carried by relatively few members of our society. If we succeed in developing a large and vital audience for music to balance our large and vital population of performing musicians, and those people each contribute a small share to the economy that supports live music we might find ourselves living in the best of all musical worlds.
Monday, June 08, 2020
Welcome to the Future
Yesterday I participate in a Zoom discussion that was hosted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra concerning the state of racial imbalance in many of the major American musical institutions (performing and educational). I was extremely impressed with the young people (meaning people who are still students) who spoke, and am eager to aquaint myself with the work of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, which, I believe, is a window to the music of the future.
Schoenberg believed, for a period of time, that the future of music would lie in atonality. He was partially right, because the music of his future (the one that happened after he died--on the date that he predicted he would die) does involve atonality and does involve serialism. The people who wrote for television in the 1970s incorporated serialism and atonality into their scores. Most people watching shows like Bonanza probably didn't even realize that dramatic tension on the screen was often underscored with atonality. And don't forget about Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant score for Planet of the Apes.
Schoenbergian twelve-tone music, and music that followed the atonal course scared concert-goers away from concerts that included "twentieth-century music." Atonality was big when I was young. I actually take nostalgic comfort in hearing the atonality that underscored my teenage years and young adulthood, but I have learned that as human beings we all have emotional ties to the music we heard during those years.
When I was young there were records, cassettes, the radio, concerts, school ensembles, and extra-curricular ensembles. The music we read from was limited to music that was published. I had the opportunity at Tanglewood to hear "in-manuscript" pieces being performed, and also had the opportunity to attend and participate in composers' forums at Juilliard.
With very few exceptions, the music I heard and played during my youth was written by men of European descent. I had no idea that the pop music that I heard on the radio and in public places was performed or written by people who were not of European descent. Nobody told me. And I thought that jazz was a music that only Black people played well. White people who played jazz were, in my limited and immature mind, limited.
There were female singers (obviously), and female song writers who sang their own songs, but as a young person I never thought that there were female composers who wrote anything except pop music. I heard about Lili Boulanger and Nadia Boulanger when I was a teenager hanging out with composers at Tanglewood, and people talked about Clara Schumann (but nobody played her music) and Amy Beach (made fun of in my household), but I thought that they were exceptions to the rule that only men wrote music. There were no female composers at Juilliard. Victoria Bond was a conducting student there. I had no idea she was a composer. Elizabeth Brown was one of my fellow flute students. I had no idea she was a composer.
And there were very few people of color who were students, and none who were teachers. None.
The future at that point looked to me like the past, except with difficult (to play and hear) twentieth-century music added to the mix, and occasionally celebrated.
My life changed through working at a radio station, reading, listening, and learning new music. I was fortunate. I had a record library at the radio station, and I had a university library (with a card catalog) across the campus, and an interlibrary loan system.
People coming of musical age now can curate their own "comfort music" through YouTube. If they are smart, they will use this amazing resource to develop their own opinions and ideas of what is "good" and what is not. They don't have to rely on "gatekeepers" or even algorithms. Wikipedia is, I have found, a better music encyclopedia than Grove.
And through this Covid-19 isolation young people who have a taste for music (and a good internet connection) can hear performances of new music remotely. And they will see and hear that people writing and playing "classical music" really well are people of all genders, of all races, and of all nationalities.
There are some serious points of growth that have been brought on by the Covid-19 isolation:
Musicians have time and space to think about what their organizations will look like once we are able to play together in real spaces, with in-person audiences. I imagine that the future of those organizations will need to be far more inclusive concerning race and gender because that is where (eventually) the greater cultures of the world are headed. And there will be more and more ensembles like Kaleidoscipe run (I hope) by people like the students I met on this forum. There is no "going back" to the way things were. And I think that is a good thing.
Schoenberg believed, for a period of time, that the future of music would lie in atonality. He was partially right, because the music of his future (the one that happened after he died--on the date that he predicted he would die) does involve atonality and does involve serialism. The people who wrote for television in the 1970s incorporated serialism and atonality into their scores. Most people watching shows like Bonanza probably didn't even realize that dramatic tension on the screen was often underscored with atonality. And don't forget about Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant score for Planet of the Apes.
Schoenbergian twelve-tone music, and music that followed the atonal course scared concert-goers away from concerts that included "twentieth-century music." Atonality was big when I was young. I actually take nostalgic comfort in hearing the atonality that underscored my teenage years and young adulthood, but I have learned that as human beings we all have emotional ties to the music we heard during those years.
When I was young there were records, cassettes, the radio, concerts, school ensembles, and extra-curricular ensembles. The music we read from was limited to music that was published. I had the opportunity at Tanglewood to hear "in-manuscript" pieces being performed, and also had the opportunity to attend and participate in composers' forums at Juilliard.
With very few exceptions, the music I heard and played during my youth was written by men of European descent. I had no idea that the pop music that I heard on the radio and in public places was performed or written by people who were not of European descent. Nobody told me. And I thought that jazz was a music that only Black people played well. White people who played jazz were, in my limited and immature mind, limited.
There were female singers (obviously), and female song writers who sang their own songs, but as a young person I never thought that there were female composers who wrote anything except pop music. I heard about Lili Boulanger and Nadia Boulanger when I was a teenager hanging out with composers at Tanglewood, and people talked about Clara Schumann (but nobody played her music) and Amy Beach (made fun of in my household), but I thought that they were exceptions to the rule that only men wrote music. There were no female composers at Juilliard. Victoria Bond was a conducting student there. I had no idea she was a composer. Elizabeth Brown was one of my fellow flute students. I had no idea she was a composer.
And there were very few people of color who were students, and none who were teachers. None.
The future at that point looked to me like the past, except with difficult (to play and hear) twentieth-century music added to the mix, and occasionally celebrated.
My life changed through working at a radio station, reading, listening, and learning new music. I was fortunate. I had a record library at the radio station, and I had a university library (with a card catalog) across the campus, and an interlibrary loan system.
People coming of musical age now can curate their own "comfort music" through YouTube. If they are smart, they will use this amazing resource to develop their own opinions and ideas of what is "good" and what is not. They don't have to rely on "gatekeepers" or even algorithms. Wikipedia is, I have found, a better music encyclopedia than Grove.
And through this Covid-19 isolation young people who have a taste for music (and a good internet connection) can hear performances of new music remotely. And they will see and hear that people writing and playing "classical music" really well are people of all genders, of all races, and of all nationalities.
There are some serious points of growth that have been brought on by the Covid-19 isolation:
We are learning that there are excellent musicians everywhere. Great playing is not something that you only find in big cities. You find it everywhere.
And there are a lot of people using this time of isolation to practice.
Musicians are innovative: in the first weeks of the isolation musicians with smartphones and computers figured out how to record themselves and assemble plausible performances of short pieces with other musicians isolated in different places. I have heard some of the most moving performances put together in this way.
A lot of people use a free Acapella smartphone app that publishes directly to Facebook and Instagram. Selections are limited to three or four minutes, so shorter "classical" musical selections are being recorded and performed in this way a lot. Musicians who would not normally try their hand at arranging are making excellent arrangements. And we all know that making arrangements is a gateway drug to composition.
Some musicians are finding that they enjoy the technical process of weaving together remote voices. Some are "producing" excellent videos. These are skills of the future, because I believe that this way of music making will retain a place in the post-Covid-19 musical future.
I don't think that musicians will be abandoning the friendships they have made through these videos.
Musicians have time and space to think about what their organizations will look like once we are able to play together in real spaces, with in-person audiences. I imagine that the future of those organizations will need to be far more inclusive concerning race and gender because that is where (eventually) the greater cultures of the world are headed. And there will be more and more ensembles like Kaleidoscipe run (I hope) by people like the students I met on this forum. There is no "going back" to the way things were. And I think that is a good thing.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Memory Palaces
I am not a conductor, and will never be, but I had a wonderful time leading last night's Summer Strings rehearsal. I got as far back and as high up as I could to get as many people as possible into this photo.
I usually spend rehearsal time holding down the viola section while someone competent does the conducting. I also make the arrangements. Last night our conductor was unable to come to rehearsal, and we had four people in the viola section, so I conducted the rehearsal. It was the first time I had ever heard my arrangements from the position of a conductor. I was really pleased with the way my arrangements worked, and I loved to see and hear how much people enjoyed playing them. It was really exciting.
I didn't get much sleep because I just couldn't get the music we rehearsed out of my head. It was great fun, and it was a highly productive rehearsal. I do wonder how conductors actually get to sleep after conducting a rehearsal.
Anyway . . .
Michael and I went to the Farmer's Market at around 7:30 this morning, and we popped into a new book store that had opened up on the square. Joe, the owner of the book store, is a friendly man who to attended the local university in the 1980s. He recently moved to Charleston from Chicago because of his fond memories of the town, particularly the university station where I spent 13 years as the classical music director, and Michael had a weekly jazz program. Joe thanked us many times for the work that we did. The people who run the current university station (with the same call letters and the same frequency) somehow managed to wipe those 13 wonderful radio years out of their history, but there are people who remember.
I wrote a blog post about the station back in 2007.
After we brought our goodies home from the market and the book store (I picked up a copy of Moby Dick, which was exactly what I was looking for), I took my iPod for a walk and listened to an episode of Radio Diaries called "Welcome to the Memory Palace". This podcast was all about Guglielmo Marconi and his theory about sounds (including radio broadcasts) continuing to travel infinite distances after they are broadcast. I believe that Marconi's theory has been scientifically proven to be wrong, but this morning's adventure shows a different way that radio signals can travel. They can echo in the palace of memory.
I usually spend rehearsal time holding down the viola section while someone competent does the conducting. I also make the arrangements. Last night our conductor was unable to come to rehearsal, and we had four people in the viola section, so I conducted the rehearsal. It was the first time I had ever heard my arrangements from the position of a conductor. I was really pleased with the way my arrangements worked, and I loved to see and hear how much people enjoyed playing them. It was really exciting.
I didn't get much sleep because I just couldn't get the music we rehearsed out of my head. It was great fun, and it was a highly productive rehearsal. I do wonder how conductors actually get to sleep after conducting a rehearsal.
Anyway . . .
Michael and I went to the Farmer's Market at around 7:30 this morning, and we popped into a new book store that had opened up on the square. Joe, the owner of the book store, is a friendly man who to attended the local university in the 1980s. He recently moved to Charleston from Chicago because of his fond memories of the town, particularly the university station where I spent 13 years as the classical music director, and Michael had a weekly jazz program. Joe thanked us many times for the work that we did. The people who run the current university station (with the same call letters and the same frequency) somehow managed to wipe those 13 wonderful radio years out of their history, but there are people who remember.
I wrote a blog post about the station back in 2007.
After we brought our goodies home from the market and the book store (I picked up a copy of Moby Dick, which was exactly what I was looking for), I took my iPod for a walk and listened to an episode of Radio Diaries called "Welcome to the Memory Palace". This podcast was all about Guglielmo Marconi and his theory about sounds (including radio broadcasts) continuing to travel infinite distances after they are broadcast. I believe that Marconi's theory has been scientifically proven to be wrong, but this morning's adventure shows a different way that radio signals can travel. They can echo in the palace of memory.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Playing with Records
I didn't have a huge number of records (I'm talking about LPs) when I was growing up, and during my preteen years, we didn't even have a working record player (imagine--in a household of musicians). When I was in the 7th grade, I was given (after I got up the courage to ask) a cassette player and a few cassette recordings of age-appropriate music (I remember Tapestry, Deja Vu, and a James Taylor cassette), and I used to spend a lot of time listening late at night to an old Zenith radio that my parents had abandoned.
Perhaps it is when one of the radio tubes blew and could not be replaced (I recall hauling the heavy thing to the hardware store, and being very disappointed) that I got my first working record player. It was a high-class hybrid KLH model 20 that played at four speeds (16, 33, 45, and 78), and, unlike the one pictured below, had a radio tuner. We got it nearly new: it had only been used during the summer at Tanglewood, in the music library.
My father got a turntable and speakers made by AR that fall. It didn't have a radio or any other bells and whistles, and it only played at 33 r.p.m.I found a stash of my parents' old records in the attic (a lot of Columbia chamber music recordings from various Casals festivals during the 1950s), and my father started buying new records. I had just started playing the flute, but there were not that many flute recordings around, except for recordings by Jean-Pierre Rampal. I preferred listening to non-flute recordings anyway (though I did like listening to recordings by Julius Baker). I had a flute-playing friend who had a whole series of "Music Minus One" recordings. I had no idea how to get any of those, so I remember buying a Rampal record and trying to play along with it. I was surprised to find that the recording was about half a tone sharp. I used the 16 r.p.m. setting to slow down that 33 r.p.m. recording to half speed, and I rather enjoyed listening to the uneven sloppiness in his playing.
When I was getting ready to audition for Juilliard, I had the idea of practicing my G-major Mozart Concerto with the Julius Baker recording (he actually sounded pretty good at 16 r.p.m). I decided that I would play the slow movement for my audition (I imagined that everyone else would be playing the fast movements), and I thought that playing along with the recording would help me to get inside of Julius Baker's musical head. I made a little star in my music every time he changed color, and I made sure to change my tone color in some way (but not the same way) at each of those points.
I guess it worked. I got in.
I had great times with my KLH. I even figured out how to wire my cassette player/recorder to make the sound go through the speakers.
Julius Baker used to tell his students to listen to recordings of Heifetz. I didn't have any Heifetz recordings (I guess I considered him too commercial for my eclectic tastes), but my friend Danny Morganstern had everything. I listened to the whole Heifetz collection (as it was the late 1970s) with him during the summer between my second and third years at Juilliard, and he gave me cassette tapes to take home. I got bought a few choice pieces at Patelson's, and used my "enhanced" audio system to play along with Heifetz on the flute (I particularly loved playing the Saint-Saens D minor Sonata with him and Emanuel Bay). I actually had my teacher's attention (a rare occurrence) at a lesson after one of my evenings with Mr. Heifetz. I never told him my secret.
Danny, who always plays with records, told me that if you play along with a recording, you are playing along with a really great musician's best work. Listening is one thing, but actually experiencing the physical movement involved in playing a piece (or even a passage of a piece) brings you right into the head of the people playing. I still play with recordings, and I sometimes play along with recordings that I get to review. You can learn an awful lot by joining in the dance, especially when playing an inner voice.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Nothing is more practical than idealism
I have a piece of paper in my viola case that has a quote from Ira Hirschmann that says, "Nothing is more practical than idealism." It comes from his memoir Obligato: Untold Tales from a Life with Music that I read years ago, and passed on to a either a friend or a family member (I can't for the life of me remember who). Perhaps it is about time to get myself a new/old copy because, once again, the practicality of idealism is being challenged in a big way.
Hirschmann tells the story of how classical music concert broadcasts first hit the radio waves. The story also appeared in The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1949-1950) on pages 683-684, which I will paraphrase:
During the 1920s, when Hirschmann was working in the advertising department at L. Bamberger & Company, the department store that hosted the newly-minted WOR radio station on its sixth floor (so that they could sell more radios), he got a idea to broadcast New York Philharmonic concerts directly from Carnegie Hall over the radio. The Philharmonic’s manger, Arthur Judson, agreed to a price of $15,000 to broadcast the Thursday evening concerts for the whole season, but when Hirschmann approached Felix Fuld, the co-owner of Bamberger's and WOR (and, along with Mr. Bamberger, was also a subscriber to the Philharmonic concerts) with the idea, he insisted that most American people did not want to hear symphony music. He went on to say that they didn’t know what it was.
When Hirschmann invited ten girls from the bookkeeping department of the store to come in to his office and asked them (right in front of Fuld) if they would listen to symphony music if it were played on the radio, every one said that she would. Mr. Fuld still thought that $15,000 was too much money to take out of the advertising budget, and that was that, until the next morning, when Hirschmann got a call from Mrs. Felix Fuld who said that she would contribute the money as long as nobody knew where it came from. She said, “Men have no imagination” before hanging up the phone.
Hirschman added at the end of the article, “If I am violating a confidence of Mrs. Fuld's, who ten years ago passed away, I may be forgiven on the grounds of adding a historical footnote to a pivotal point in the musical culture of our time.”
Hirschmann tells the story of how classical music concert broadcasts first hit the radio waves. The story also appeared in The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1949-1950) on pages 683-684, which I will paraphrase:
During the 1920s, when Hirschmann was working in the advertising department at L. Bamberger & Company, the department store that hosted the newly-minted WOR radio station on its sixth floor (so that they could sell more radios), he got a idea to broadcast New York Philharmonic concerts directly from Carnegie Hall over the radio. The Philharmonic’s manger, Arthur Judson, agreed to a price of $15,000 to broadcast the Thursday evening concerts for the whole season, but when Hirschmann approached Felix Fuld, the co-owner of Bamberger's and WOR (and, along with Mr. Bamberger, was also a subscriber to the Philharmonic concerts) with the idea, he insisted that most American people did not want to hear symphony music. He went on to say that they didn’t know what it was.
When Hirschmann invited ten girls from the bookkeeping department of the store to come in to his office and asked them (right in front of Fuld) if they would listen to symphony music if it were played on the radio, every one said that she would. Mr. Fuld still thought that $15,000 was too much money to take out of the advertising budget, and that was that, until the next morning, when Hirschmann got a call from Mrs. Felix Fuld who said that she would contribute the money as long as nobody knew where it came from. She said, “Men have no imagination” before hanging up the phone.
Hirschman added at the end of the article, “If I am violating a confidence of Mrs. Fuld's, who ten years ago passed away, I may be forgiven on the grounds of adding a historical footnote to a pivotal point in the musical culture of our time.”
Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Music of Our Mothers Radio Program May 10th
Tomorrow, May 10th, between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m Eastern Time I will be one of the featured composers on a radio program called "Music of our Mothers" on WFCF, Flagler College's radio station, 88.5 in St. Augustine, Florida. You can listen to the live stream of the program through this link and read about the program on their website.
There will also be music by Cecilia Macdowell, Mercedes Zavala Gironés, Vivian Adelbert Rudow, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, Missy Mazzoli, and Nancy Dalberg on tomorrow's program.
They will be talking about and playing my set of pieces for contrabassoon and piano called "More Greek Myths."
There will also be music by Cecilia Macdowell, Mercedes Zavala Gironés, Vivian Adelbert Rudow, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, Missy Mazzoli, and Nancy Dalberg on tomorrow's program.
They will be talking about and playing my set of pieces for contrabassoon and piano called "More Greek Myths."
Friday, June 05, 2009
Background Music
Perhaps, if I got out more, I would not be so terribly sensitive to background music. I confess that there have been times that I have enjoyed background music, which leads me to imagine that perhaps, with the general desensitization to music and its constant availability that has quietly (and not so quietly) changed the way a lot of people think about music in the marketplace, perhaps background music has changed. Or, perhaps, it is actually being used for a certain kind of manipulation.
I used to enjoy going to book stores. Sometimes the people working at book stores would have a radio up by the register, and I would enjoy the counterpoint between what was on the radio (over at the front of the store) and what I was thinking of reading. It used to be local programming--recordings put on a turntable or a CD machine by a person sitting in a radio booth somewhere within a 50-100 mile radius, who knew that part of the listening audience was made of people in book stores. Once in a while, during the CD age, people would bring in CDs that they wanted to listen to while they were working. And they tended to be sensitive to their customers.
I would spend both hours and money in book stores (which I refuse to call "bookstores," by the way). Yesterday's book store experience (which I suppose, being at a mega-chain book store, should be called a "bookstore" experience), made it impossible for me to spend either time or money.
The very loud country music that played over who knows how many speakers, along with horrible progressive-lens-unfriendly-lighting that made me wonder if I needed new glasses, or even a new prescription, made it impossible for me to concentrate. The rest of my family (all people who enjoy reading, by the way) found it impossible to stay in there as well.
I contemplated the idea that the marketing overlords of this "bookstore" might be thinking of making the "bookstore" a place that would be uncomfortable to read, the way fast-food restaurants engineer their furniture in a way that makes it uncomfortable to sit for much longer than the length of a fast-food meal. Perhaps they want to discourage browsing, making it necessary for you to buy a book in order to decide whether you want to read it.
I used to enjoy going to book stores. Sometimes the people working at book stores would have a radio up by the register, and I would enjoy the counterpoint between what was on the radio (over at the front of the store) and what I was thinking of reading. It used to be local programming--recordings put on a turntable or a CD machine by a person sitting in a radio booth somewhere within a 50-100 mile radius, who knew that part of the listening audience was made of people in book stores. Once in a while, during the CD age, people would bring in CDs that they wanted to listen to while they were working. And they tended to be sensitive to their customers.
I would spend both hours and money in book stores (which I refuse to call "bookstores," by the way). Yesterday's book store experience (which I suppose, being at a mega-chain book store, should be called a "bookstore" experience), made it impossible for me to spend either time or money.
The very loud country music that played over who knows how many speakers, along with horrible progressive-lens-unfriendly-lighting that made me wonder if I needed new glasses, or even a new prescription, made it impossible for me to concentrate. The rest of my family (all people who enjoy reading, by the way) found it impossible to stay in there as well.
I contemplated the idea that the marketing overlords of this "bookstore" might be thinking of making the "bookstore" a place that would be uncomfortable to read, the way fast-food restaurants engineer their furniture in a way that makes it uncomfortable to sit for much longer than the length of a fast-food meal. Perhaps they want to discourage browsing, making it necessary for you to buy a book in order to decide whether you want to read it.
Sunday, August 23, 2020
More Confessions of a Former CD Reviewer
During the past decade or so I have written the occasional post about my relationship to recordings. I cut many of my musical teeth on a few dozen, and spent my young adult life exploring more music by way of recordings. I was an avid radio listener, and then became a "classical music director" of a college radio station, where I got to expand my horizons far and wide. Then I started writing CD reviews, and was charged with explaining the virtues and faults I found in them. After thirteen years of writing at least fifty reviews a year, and acquiring more recordings than I could hold in both my office and house, I stopped writing for the magazine. My relationship to the CD as an "object" became a less-than-loving one, and I took a good long break.
I have seriously only purcased half a dozen CDs in the past six years (I stopped writing reviews in 2014). I rarely listen to CDs for pleasure, unless I'm driving in the car (our car is old enough to have a CD player built in) and sharing the experience with Michael.
After a diet of listening mostly to live music for a year or two, I eventually was able to find some enjoyment in listening to recordings I found on YouTube. The pleasure of listening without having to "report" on what you hear is highly underrated.
A few weeks ago Michael ordered a copy of Augustin Hadelich's new "Bohemian Tales" recording. It has a lot of Dvorak: the Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony conducted by Jakub Hruša, Songs My Mother Taught Me, in an arragement by Hadelich and Charles Owen (the pianist on this recording), Fritz Kreisler's arrangement of the Humoresque, and the fourth Romantic Piece from the Opus 75 set. They also play the Janáček Violin Sonata, and Josef Suk's Four Pieces, Opus 17.
Michael and I listened to the Dvorak Concerto in the car, and I was excited to spend some of the trip back and forth to New Jersey that we took Thursday and Friday (bringing Michael's mother to Illinois to live) listening to more of the CD with him, but, alas, the minivan we rented did not have a CD player.
Since Michael bought the CD for me, I feel guilty about keeping the pleasure that it affords all to myself. But I have dipped in. A few times. And I intend to listen to it again and again, because the music-making is so honest and so beautifully thought out. The phrases are always tasteful, but always brought to their musical extreme: how rhythmic a hemiola can be, how agitated a "whisper" can be, how long and sustained a phrase can be, and how thoughtful and personal. And everything is about the music: what it can express, and how it can meet the emotional needs of the person listening.
My friend Danny Morganstern told me long ago that when you listen to a recording, you are listening to a person's best playing. But this CD goes beyond merely someone's best playing. This CD is satisfying on more levels than (just) the music making.
Augustin wrote the notes himself. They are brilliant notes that get right to the functional and emotional core of the music. And the notes are in both German and English. I imagine that he wrote them in both languages. The recording quality is extraordinary. It allows us to hear all the voices of his fantastic violin (the one that Szeryng used to make many of his great recordings), and to experience the Concerto differently from the usual soloist vs. orchestra approach. Here Augustin interacts with all the voices in the orchestra, weaving in and around, dancing with one instrument, and then another. When listening to this recording I feel like I am hearing the music exactly the way Dvorak heard it in his head while writing.
Dvorak certainly knew some great violinists, but I think that if Augustin Hadelich were alive during his lifetime, Augustin would have been his favorite violinist.
As I have said before, I am grateful to live in the same lifetime as Augustin Hadelich.
This morning I thought that it would be handy to use iTunes to sync this CD to my phone. I used to do that sort of thing when I had an ipod (but that was back when I was writing reviews, more than six years ago).
I loaded the CD into iTunes, and was pleased and impressed that all the tracks on the CD were appropriately named and numbered, but I could not figure out how to sync the music to my phone. I followed all the procedures, but no phone icon ever popped up to allows some sort of sync. I tried using every possible connector, but no soap.
I finally loaded the music on the CD into Dropbox, so I now can listen to it anytime and anywhere.
I have seriously only purcased half a dozen CDs in the past six years (I stopped writing reviews in 2014). I rarely listen to CDs for pleasure, unless I'm driving in the car (our car is old enough to have a CD player built in) and sharing the experience with Michael.
After a diet of listening mostly to live music for a year or two, I eventually was able to find some enjoyment in listening to recordings I found on YouTube. The pleasure of listening without having to "report" on what you hear is highly underrated.
A few weeks ago Michael ordered a copy of Augustin Hadelich's new "Bohemian Tales" recording. It has a lot of Dvorak: the Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony conducted by Jakub Hruša, Songs My Mother Taught Me, in an arragement by Hadelich and Charles Owen (the pianist on this recording), Fritz Kreisler's arrangement of the Humoresque, and the fourth Romantic Piece from the Opus 75 set. They also play the Janáček Violin Sonata, and Josef Suk's Four Pieces, Opus 17.
Michael and I listened to the Dvorak Concerto in the car, and I was excited to spend some of the trip back and forth to New Jersey that we took Thursday and Friday (bringing Michael's mother to Illinois to live) listening to more of the CD with him, but, alas, the minivan we rented did not have a CD player.
Since Michael bought the CD for me, I feel guilty about keeping the pleasure that it affords all to myself. But I have dipped in. A few times. And I intend to listen to it again and again, because the music-making is so honest and so beautifully thought out. The phrases are always tasteful, but always brought to their musical extreme: how rhythmic a hemiola can be, how agitated a "whisper" can be, how long and sustained a phrase can be, and how thoughtful and personal. And everything is about the music: what it can express, and how it can meet the emotional needs of the person listening.
My friend Danny Morganstern told me long ago that when you listen to a recording, you are listening to a person's best playing. But this CD goes beyond merely someone's best playing. This CD is satisfying on more levels than (just) the music making.
Augustin wrote the notes himself. They are brilliant notes that get right to the functional and emotional core of the music. And the notes are in both German and English. I imagine that he wrote them in both languages. The recording quality is extraordinary. It allows us to hear all the voices of his fantastic violin (the one that Szeryng used to make many of his great recordings), and to experience the Concerto differently from the usual soloist vs. orchestra approach. Here Augustin interacts with all the voices in the orchestra, weaving in and around, dancing with one instrument, and then another. When listening to this recording I feel like I am hearing the music exactly the way Dvorak heard it in his head while writing.
Dvorak certainly knew some great violinists, but I think that if Augustin Hadelich were alive during his lifetime, Augustin would have been his favorite violinist.
As I have said before, I am grateful to live in the same lifetime as Augustin Hadelich.
This morning I thought that it would be handy to use iTunes to sync this CD to my phone. I used to do that sort of thing when I had an ipod (but that was back when I was writing reviews, more than six years ago).
I loaded the CD into iTunes, and was pleased and impressed that all the tracks on the CD were appropriately named and numbered, but I could not figure out how to sync the music to my phone. I followed all the procedures, but no phone icon ever popped up to allows some sort of sync. I tried using every possible connector, but no soap.
I finally loaded the music on the CD into Dropbox, so I now can listen to it anytime and anywhere.
Monday, September 06, 2021
A Tale of Two Cities
In 2017 a new used bookstore opened up on the Charleston square. The owner, who owned the largest used bookstore in Chicago, moved to Charleston (by way of Arkansas) to raise his family in a more rural place. He had also gone to college in Charleston, and had fond memories of the friendly and intellectually offbeat community he encountered here.
I stopped into the bookstore shortly after it opened. Joe, the owner, told me how much he loved the college radio station when he was a student, and that he was having difficulty finding it. All he could get was a "top 40" station.
The radio station he remembered was the one that I worked at during the 1980s and 1990s. It turned into a "hit mix" station right after I left. Sometimes we think that the fixtures in a place will remain there after we leave. But places change, and too many of the fixtures live only in our memory of a place.
Joe's bookstore (called Bob's Books, after his father) made a huge impact on the community. Before it got filled with books, there was space large enough for our Collegium to play a concert there. We even gained a new member that evening because a recorder player from Germany, who had just moved to the area, stopped into the bookstore that evening, and heard our concert. It was such a moment of serendipity.
Joe had to move from the square because of safety issues, but he found a great new location accross the street from the university. After a couple of years the owner of the new building suddenly forced him to move, and he found a new location just off the square in a shaded building adjacent to a coffee shop. It was a perfect location. He moved during the first several months of the pandemic, and was eventually able to open up the store to people who wore masks.
I just learned that Joe has suddenly moved his family to Chicago, and is in the process of moving his bookstore there. I imagine it is because of the people who live around here who refuse to wear masks. I imagine that with all Joe's best intentions to try to give something of value to a city that existed, in part, in his nostalgic memory, it became a full-time job for him to have to deal with people who thought they had a right to go into his store without wearing masks.
It is astounding to me that despite a state mandate for masks, and signs on doors of businesses requiring masks, so few businesses are willing to enforce mask-wearing.
We will miss Joe and his bookstore, and I trust that he will be successful and will be safer and happier in Chicago.
After our first visit to Charleston in 1985 (we came here from Boston in order to look for a place to live), we made a list of a hundred things to like about Charleston. Michael was welcomed by a lively English department, and I was welcomed by a musical community that was happy to have me. Michael put in a good thirty years of teaching before the governor-assisted decline of the university and its enrollment (to put things politely), and I was able to create a baroque ensemble (back in my flute-playing days), work at a radio station, help form a string quartet, go to graduate school, help form a Renaissance consort, and help form a summer string orchestra. Together we live in a house that we really like (after doing a lot to improve it), and enjoy the natural beauty of the area.
We have raised two children, developed some strong friendships, and have participated in many community activities. But it seems to me that most of what we have done for the community is of our own making. We have given more than we have taken, which in most circumstances seems like a good formula for happiness. But so much of what was here has gone away, leaving some shared memories (some good, and some not so good).
And after thirty odd years (some odder than others) this is still home. And I still hope that things can change for the better, even if there is nowhere to buy books in town.
I stopped into the bookstore shortly after it opened. Joe, the owner, told me how much he loved the college radio station when he was a student, and that he was having difficulty finding it. All he could get was a "top 40" station.
The radio station he remembered was the one that I worked at during the 1980s and 1990s. It turned into a "hit mix" station right after I left. Sometimes we think that the fixtures in a place will remain there after we leave. But places change, and too many of the fixtures live only in our memory of a place.
Joe's bookstore (called Bob's Books, after his father) made a huge impact on the community. Before it got filled with books, there was space large enough for our Collegium to play a concert there. We even gained a new member that evening because a recorder player from Germany, who had just moved to the area, stopped into the bookstore that evening, and heard our concert. It was such a moment of serendipity.
Joe had to move from the square because of safety issues, but he found a great new location accross the street from the university. After a couple of years the owner of the new building suddenly forced him to move, and he found a new location just off the square in a shaded building adjacent to a coffee shop. It was a perfect location. He moved during the first several months of the pandemic, and was eventually able to open up the store to people who wore masks.
I just learned that Joe has suddenly moved his family to Chicago, and is in the process of moving his bookstore there. I imagine it is because of the people who live around here who refuse to wear masks. I imagine that with all Joe's best intentions to try to give something of value to a city that existed, in part, in his nostalgic memory, it became a full-time job for him to have to deal with people who thought they had a right to go into his store without wearing masks.
It is astounding to me that despite a state mandate for masks, and signs on doors of businesses requiring masks, so few businesses are willing to enforce mask-wearing.
We will miss Joe and his bookstore, and I trust that he will be successful and will be safer and happier in Chicago.
After our first visit to Charleston in 1985 (we came here from Boston in order to look for a place to live), we made a list of a hundred things to like about Charleston. Michael was welcomed by a lively English department, and I was welcomed by a musical community that was happy to have me. Michael put in a good thirty years of teaching before the governor-assisted decline of the university and its enrollment (to put things politely), and I was able to create a baroque ensemble (back in my flute-playing days), work at a radio station, help form a string quartet, go to graduate school, help form a Renaissance consort, and help form a summer string orchestra. Together we live in a house that we really like (after doing a lot to improve it), and enjoy the natural beauty of the area.
We have raised two children, developed some strong friendships, and have participated in many community activities. But it seems to me that most of what we have done for the community is of our own making. We have given more than we have taken, which in most circumstances seems like a good formula for happiness. But so much of what was here has gone away, leaving some shared memories (some good, and some not so good).
And after thirty odd years (some odder than others) this is still home. And I still hope that things can change for the better, even if there is nowhere to buy books in town.
Sunday, November 02, 2014
Meet the Composer II
A while ago I made a post about WQXR's Q2 Podcast called Meet the Composer, and now that I have listened to a few episodes beyond the interview with Caroline Shaw, I'm starting to have issues. I could stew about these issues, or I could write about them. I choose to write.
Nadia Sirota, the host of the show, is a far better violist than I am, and a far better radio host than I was during my time on the air (broadcasting 40 miles in all directions from a college station in a small town in downstate Illinois during the last century). I certainly appreciate what she is doing for the composers she works with in New York, and for new music in general, but I fear that the music she presents on this particular program (at least this year) sounds kind of the same to me. It seems that everything I have heard so far (with few exceptions) is minimalist in nature, and much of the string music seems to exploit the natural harmonic series.
I listened to a great deal of new music when I was a teenager in the 1970s. My first opera was Wozzeck. The first piece I sang in a professional chorus was Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum. I have a special fondness for the sound of 12-tone music because it reminds me of Tanglewood, where I spent summer after summer attending the Fromm Festival concerts. I wanted to be a composer during the 1970s, but I knew that writing in the 12-tone idiom was not any kind of true expression of who I happened to be. I had no interest in electronics, and never wanted to use rock music as the basis of the music I imagined writing (like my brother Marshall did). As much as I would like to have embraced it, I found minimalist music repetitive and boring. I wanted to write music that meant something to me, and I wanted to write music that would be as moving to me as the music that I loved from the whole of the history of notated music. I couldn't wait for minimalism to die out. By the time I turned 40 I had lots and lots of music to write, so I just started writing.
When I was in my 20s I thought I knew a lot about music. A lot of people thought I knew a lot about music. Through working at the radio station and reading scores and scores of books about music I learned more about music. I eventually learned that I knew very little, and that my narrow-minded views were ridiculous. Perhaps they still are.
I don't believe I really started to learn about music until I reached my 40s and started writing music seriously. Now that I am 55 I feel like a kid in a candy store, because with the hopes of a career behind me, I have the leisure to keep learning new things about music. My experience of music is far deeper than it was when I was in my 20s and 30s, and my understanding of how important it is to get from one note to the next in a meaningful way sometimes yields real results. Sometimes I get, whether writing or playing, from one note to the next in a way that I feel is a true expression of how the music should go.
I do hope that Nadia Sirota ventures out of the envelope she has drawn around her new radio program and finds composers of note (no pun intended) who write in ways that don't simply reflect her personal love of extended techniques, minimalism, the harmonic series, and their spectral sisters. There are a whole lot of people in her parents' generation (like me) and even in her grandparents' generation who are indeed interested in hearing interviews with living composers who write in other ways, even in traditional ways.
Nadia Sirota, the host of the show, is a far better violist than I am, and a far better radio host than I was during my time on the air (broadcasting 40 miles in all directions from a college station in a small town in downstate Illinois during the last century). I certainly appreciate what she is doing for the composers she works with in New York, and for new music in general, but I fear that the music she presents on this particular program (at least this year) sounds kind of the same to me. It seems that everything I have heard so far (with few exceptions) is minimalist in nature, and much of the string music seems to exploit the natural harmonic series.
I listened to a great deal of new music when I was a teenager in the 1970s. My first opera was Wozzeck. The first piece I sang in a professional chorus was Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum. I have a special fondness for the sound of 12-tone music because it reminds me of Tanglewood, where I spent summer after summer attending the Fromm Festival concerts. I wanted to be a composer during the 1970s, but I knew that writing in the 12-tone idiom was not any kind of true expression of who I happened to be. I had no interest in electronics, and never wanted to use rock music as the basis of the music I imagined writing (like my brother Marshall did). As much as I would like to have embraced it, I found minimalist music repetitive and boring. I wanted to write music that meant something to me, and I wanted to write music that would be as moving to me as the music that I loved from the whole of the history of notated music. I couldn't wait for minimalism to die out. By the time I turned 40 I had lots and lots of music to write, so I just started writing.
When I was in my 20s I thought I knew a lot about music. A lot of people thought I knew a lot about music. Through working at the radio station and reading scores and scores of books about music I learned more about music. I eventually learned that I knew very little, and that my narrow-minded views were ridiculous. Perhaps they still are.
I don't believe I really started to learn about music until I reached my 40s and started writing music seriously. Now that I am 55 I feel like a kid in a candy store, because with the hopes of a career behind me, I have the leisure to keep learning new things about music. My experience of music is far deeper than it was when I was in my 20s and 30s, and my understanding of how important it is to get from one note to the next in a meaningful way sometimes yields real results. Sometimes I get, whether writing or playing, from one note to the next in a way that I feel is a true expression of how the music should go.
I do hope that Nadia Sirota ventures out of the envelope she has drawn around her new radio program and finds composers of note (no pun intended) who write in ways that don't simply reflect her personal love of extended techniques, minimalism, the harmonic series, and their spectral sisters. There are a whole lot of people in her parents' generation (like me) and even in her grandparents' generation who are indeed interested in hearing interviews with living composers who write in other ways, even in traditional ways.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Frances Shrand: The Most Beautiful Voice on Radio
I knew Frances Shrand as the mother of my friend Joe (who was one of the original members of the cast of Zoom), and as the reader of The Wind and the Willows on a Boston-based radio program called "The Spider's Web," a program I mentioned in my last post about Brother Blue. Joe was also on the program, playing the part of the rat.
I just found out that she died this past March. I also learned from her obituary that she was born in Brooklyn.
I was once at a party at the Shrand house when I was a young teenager. Some of the young teenagers at the party had gotten into a bit of trouble, and Frances insisted on calling the parents of all the people who were there. When my father got the call from Frances, he practically melted. Whatever humiliating (to me) reason she called was meaningless to him. He was tickled to hear her voice--the one he knew from the radio, and admired greatly.
You can listen to her (and Joe) read the The Wind and the Willows here.
I just found out that she died this past March. I also learned from her obituary that she was born in Brooklyn.
I was once at a party at the Shrand house when I was a young teenager. Some of the young teenagers at the party had gotten into a bit of trouble, and Frances insisted on calling the parents of all the people who were there. When my father got the call from Frances, he practically melted. Whatever humiliating (to me) reason she called was meaningless to him. He was tickled to hear her voice--the one he knew from the radio, and admired greatly.
You can listen to her (and Joe) read the The Wind and the Willows here.
Friday, July 05, 2019
Eva Kor (1934 - 2019)
I heard about my friend Eva Kor's death through the national media today. (Well by text message from Michael, who heard it announced on NPR.) I have had Eva on my mind all afternoon.
During a massive power outage one Friday morning in February of 1994, I was at work at WEIU-FM, a college radio station in East Central Illinois. We had gone off the air. I knew there was an older guest coming to be interviewed that morning in the television station (WEIU-TV) that shared the building with the radio station. I grabbed the flashlight that was in the radio station and helped make sure that this guest could see her way to safety.
That's how I found myself spending two or three hours sitting in a darkened room with Eva Kor.
She had traveled the one-hour journey to Charleston from Terre Haute, Indiana where she sold real estate. A few years earlier Eva had taken a speech class at Indiana State University from Sue Kaufman, the newly-hired news director at WEIU-TV. She took the class in order to be able to learn to speak publicly about her experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Sue wanted to give Eva the chance to speak on television, and also thought it was a great chance for the (fledgling) television station to do something of real substance.
In those few hours Eva told me about her experiences as a victim of Mengele's experiments. She told me about the struggles she had to get people to take her seriously. She really needed to speak, and knew that what she had to say was important. Being taken seriously was a constant uphill struggle for her, and she was desperate for people to believe in her work. She told me that her dream was to create a Holocaust museum in Terre Haute. I offered my string quartet to play (as a gift) for the opening of her museum.
Once the date for the museum opening was set I started thinking about music to play. I couldn't find anything that was truly appropriate for the occasion, so I looked through a book of Chassidic melodies with the hope that I might be able to find something to arrange. I looked first at the texts, and I chose five that seemed to resonate with Eva's character and mission. Then I used the melodies associated with those texts as a basis for a set of pieces.
You can listen to a performance of the Five Pieces through these links:
I. Im en ani li
II. Mi ho ish
III. El male rachamim
IV. Rikud
V. Ani m'amin
Earlier this evening I picked up my copy of Echoes from Auschwitz (which I hope will go back into print) and found this inscription inside. I believe that date (my birthday!) was the date of the museum opening.
Eva and I continued to have a close relationship (sometimes a "surrogate" mother-daughter relationship) for many years. In 2005 Michael and I played for the museum's reopening after the building was destroyed by an arsonist.
Over the years Eva reached a wider and wider audience with her message of love and forgiveness (the only way she could see a way to heal from the trauma she experienced was to try to forgive the people that hurt her and her sister) and every time I read about her activities I would be filled with pride. I knew where she came from. I knew her struggles (and there are many I'm not sharing here). I knew her need to be taken seriously and to do what she could to try to ensure that the ugly part of history that robbed her of her family and her childhood would not repeat itself.
During a massive power outage one Friday morning in February of 1994, I was at work at WEIU-FM, a college radio station in East Central Illinois. We had gone off the air. I knew there was an older guest coming to be interviewed that morning in the television station (WEIU-TV) that shared the building with the radio station. I grabbed the flashlight that was in the radio station and helped make sure that this guest could see her way to safety.
That's how I found myself spending two or three hours sitting in a darkened room with Eva Kor.
She had traveled the one-hour journey to Charleston from Terre Haute, Indiana where she sold real estate. A few years earlier Eva had taken a speech class at Indiana State University from Sue Kaufman, the newly-hired news director at WEIU-TV. She took the class in order to be able to learn to speak publicly about her experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Sue wanted to give Eva the chance to speak on television, and also thought it was a great chance for the (fledgling) television station to do something of real substance.
In those few hours Eva told me about her experiences as a victim of Mengele's experiments. She told me about the struggles she had to get people to take her seriously. She really needed to speak, and knew that what she had to say was important. Being taken seriously was a constant uphill struggle for her, and she was desperate for people to believe in her work. She told me that her dream was to create a Holocaust museum in Terre Haute. I offered my string quartet to play (as a gift) for the opening of her museum.
Once the date for the museum opening was set I started thinking about music to play. I couldn't find anything that was truly appropriate for the occasion, so I looked through a book of Chassidic melodies with the hope that I might be able to find something to arrange. I looked first at the texts, and I chose five that seemed to resonate with Eva's character and mission. Then I used the melodies associated with those texts as a basis for a set of pieces.
You can listen to a performance of the Five Pieces through these links:
I. Im en ani li
II. Mi ho ish
III. El male rachamim
IV. Rikud
V. Ani m'amin
Earlier this evening I picked up my copy of Echoes from Auschwitz (which I hope will go back into print) and found this inscription inside. I believe that date (my birthday!) was the date of the museum opening.
Eva and I continued to have a close relationship (sometimes a "surrogate" mother-daughter relationship) for many years. In 2005 Michael and I played for the museum's reopening after the building was destroyed by an arsonist.
Over the years Eva reached a wider and wider audience with her message of love and forgiveness (the only way she could see a way to heal from the trauma she experienced was to try to forgive the people that hurt her and her sister) and every time I read about her activities I would be filled with pride. I knew where she came from. I knew her struggles (and there are many I'm not sharing here). I knew her need to be taken seriously and to do what she could to try to ensure that the ugly part of history that robbed her of her family and her childhood would not repeat itself.
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