The Kindest Man in the World

One of the best things about going to graduate school as a composer is the number of musicians (people on the faculty as well as students) who are willing and able to play the music we write. I was rather worried that the end of graduate school would mean that most of the music I would write would sit in a drawer in my non-cosmopolitan town, but it happened that my friend Susan Teicher's mother (who happened to be named Elaine) was in town, and she suggested that I contact her friend Seymour Barab for advice about what to do about my work. She said she would tell him to expect a letter from me.

I knew one piece by Seymour Barab: a duet for viola and harp that my father used to play with his wife during the early 1980s. My half brother (who was a baby when they were working on the piece) used to say "Ba-ba" whenever they would practice the Barab.

I wrote Seymour a letter and I included a couple of scores and a few recordings. He called me a week later, and told me that he would talk with his publisher about looking at my work. We talked about all sorts of things, and it turned out that he and I both had written operas that were settings of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. We decided to exchange scores and recordings so that we could see what the other did with the story, and began a great phone friendship and many more score exchanges. Seymour invited me, Michael, and our kids to visit the next time we were in New York, and ever since that first visit, high points of our yearly trips to New York were the afternoons we spent with Seymour and his wife Margie having lunch at 3 Guys at 96th and Madison and hanging out at their apartment.


[Margie King Barab, Michael Leddy, and Seymour Barab looking at Labonfam abeber, a nonsense book by Jean Dubuffet filled with erotic drawings.]

Seymour and I continued to exchange scores and recordings, and he always went out of his way to try to get people he worked with interested in the music I wrote. Whenever anyone asked me to write something to play on a recital, I would suggest putting a piece by Seymour on the program too. Once I even got an oboe player (John Dee--a terrific oboe player) to commission a piece for oboe and string quartet from Seymour. It felt really good to reciprocate some of Seymour's kindness to me, but there was just so much to reciprocate. He wanted to hear recordings of every recital I played and every performance of something I wrote, and he would always call to talk about them.

Seymour's name came up while I was working with Bernie Zaslav on The Viola in My Life. Seymour and Bernie played together for many years in the Composers Quartet and hadn't been in touch since Bernie left New York in 1968. I got them back in touch with one another a few years ago, and Seymour read through a draft of Bernie's book and made many excellent comments (and corrections).

Seymour died on June 28th at the age of 93. The last time Michael and I saw Seymour was on Wednesday, May 21. We had lunch at 3 Guys. He brought me a couple of books: a memoir of Harold Coletta, and Nicholas Slonimsky's Perfect Pitch: A Life Story. I found a card inside the Slonimsky book written to Seymour from a person I do not know (it looks like the person is named "Don," but I can't be sure).

He or she writes,

"Happy Belated Birthday dear Seymour--
You are a national pleasure. Oops! I meant treasure."

On the inside of the book is written,

"Dear dear Seymour--
It is a joy and a privilege to know you--
Bless you!
Happy Birthday all year."

I couldn't agree more.

Seymour Barab's Complete Philip Marshall on Vimeo

Margie King Barab just let me know that a video of Philip Marshall, Seymour Barab's Civil War opera, is available to watch on line. This work would certainly be appropriate to revive during this Sesquicentennial observance of the end of the Civil War. Here's an excerpt from E. Thomas Glascow's review in Opera News of the first performance in 1974.

ON JULY 12 came the world premiere of Seymour Barab's Philip Marshall, a timeless, engrossing drama (libretto by the composer) about a Civil War veteran who, on returning home, finds life irrevocably altered by the conflict. Sandwiched between a spoken prologue and epilogue (Mrs. Hannon's visit to the doctor of the mentally crippled hero), the opera unfolds as flashback in the minds of Philip and Mrs. Hannon; a single, functional set served through the two long acts, with blackouts and prop changes behind one of the spotlit characters carrying on a sort of memory trip. The opera seemed tailor made for television.

Barab's lyrical, tastefully orchestrated score (with arias and ensembles) got sensitive treatment from the large orchestra under Wolfgang Schanzer. In the role of Maritha--the naive impetuous girl in love with Philip--Julia Lovett proved herself a singing actress of the highest caliber, with a soprano voice of exceptional purity and range. The other roles were well filled, from Theodor Uppman's sympathetic, war-weary hero to tenor David Griffith's war-dodging prodigal son, Jonathan Hannon. Soprano Suzanne Blum sang a passionate Rosellen (Philip's fiancé-turned-madam), and as Lucius, baritone Ronald Holgate developed from sinister bordello owner to heartsick, jealous lover...

Here's the first act:

Philip Marshall part one from Ronald Blumer on Vimeo.

. . . and here's the second act:

Philip Marshall act two from Ronald Blumer on Vimeo.

"And this shall be for music . . ."

One of my favorite songs in all of twentieth-century music is Vaughan Williams's setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Roadside Fire" from his Songs of Travel. Here it is sung so beautifully by tenor Gervase Elwes in 1919.

I have always thought of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry to be inherently musical. And I know now that I am not alone! Here is listing of settings of his poems, which I know is not exhaustive, since I know of one setting that is not included. It was really exciting to see that Seymour Barab wrote a setting that was recorded by his friend Russel Oberlin:

Seymour Barab [b. 1921]. ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ for voice and piano. 2 vols. Boosey and Hawkes. Recorded in 1953 by Russell Oberlin on Counterpoint CPT 539 [LP] and in 2010 on remastered CD by Essential Media Group (ASIN: B0036VNVKG)

After spending so much time with A Child's Garden of Verses, and having been such good friends with Seymour Barab (oh why did we never talk about these?), I look forward to getting my hands on the score and my ears on a copy of the recording.
But I only recently learned that Robert Louis Stevenson was an amateur musician and composer himself!

This study by J.F.M. Russell lists Robert Louis Stevenson's musical activities and projects in historical order. It is enhanced with audio links and images. I'm planning to spend a bunch of time going through them, and I'm sharing them here so that other Robert Louis Stevenson "fans" can go through them too.

No Laughing Matter

Michael and I just returned from a vacation in Boston and New York. Most people go on vacation to get away from stimulation and stress, but since our lives are kind of topsy-turvy when it comes to matters of stimulation, we pack the most stimulation possible into our forays into the non-bucolic world, and use the rest of the year to recover, react, reflect, and remark.

Our three-day visit to New York was basically unstructured. While visiting with our friends Seymour and Margie Barab on Wednesday, we learned that on Thursday afternoon there would be a performance of Seymour's No Laughing Matter at the Philosophy Day School, an elementary school in the neighborhood. I hadn't yet had the opportunity to see one of Seymour's shows for children performed live, so we planned our mostly pedestrian sweep of the city on Thursday to end at 12 East 79th Street.

The building, which sits slightly west of the Ukrainian Institute of America, is a beautiful mansion. It houses the School of Practical Philosophy, which operates a Charter School. The school began in 1994, and, unfortunately is closing this year. This performance of No Laughing Matter was its last production.

The beautiful white dresses with little blue flowers worn by the girls in the lower grades (as their uniform) is exclusive to the school (you can see it in their Mission and Philosophy page), and on their page about the lower school. Superficial beauty aside, these were truly beautiful kids. There is something special about children who have the opportunity to get an education that equates the importance of the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of wisdom. It is very sad that this school has to close its doors. It was a true honor to have the opportunity to visit.

These fourth and fifth graders of the Philosophy Day School, many who have been singing together every morning as part of their school day since they were toddlers, had the opportunity to perform No Laughing Matter for the very-much alive 92-year-old composer, his family, friends (that would be us), some parents, the faculty, and the children of the lower school. Their usual repertoire is by the centuries-dead William Shakespeare, and they dove into Barab's work with the same integrity, seriousness, and humor that they would apply Shakespeare's comedies. These were not kids being cute. These were kids being actors. These were kids having fun working together.

The voices were beautiful. The acting was superior. Their voices projected when they spoke without the need for any amplification. Their understanding of the play was complete (Seymour Barab has a wonderful way of writing both words and music that children of all levels of sophistication can understand and enjoy). My only criticism was that they students, wanting the show to move at the proper pace, didn't always leave enough time for the laughter and applause of the audience. We had to stop applauding sooner than we would have liked in order to hear all the words.

[N.B. The kids decided to have a boar as the seal for the king in the story because the character of the king was a "bore."]

Margie King Barab (1932 - 2018)

Our dear friend Margie King Barab died peacefully in her home on Park Avenue in New York on January 3. Her 85 years of life began in Nebraska. Her singing voice took her to the Manhattan School of Music. She answered an announcement from someone looking for a room mate, and her "proxy landlord" (he was house-sitting) was the brilliant 50-year-old Alexander King. After a while, she fell in love with him. When she married Alex, Margie was not aware that he had an opium addiction. She helped him recover and served as his muse. Later in her life Margie wrote a book about him, and she told me a few years ago that it is being considered for publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

After Alex died, Margie married the great composer Seymour Barab, who was the kindest man in the world. You can read all the posts I have written about Seymour and Margie here.

I miss both Seymour and Margie so much. They were our true friends, and they were true friends to many other fortunate people. The world is considerably poorer now, but our memories of Margie and Seymour stay (together) in our hearts, and they continue to inspire us and give us comfort.

Seymour Barab's Shadow

I love this setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's "My Shadow" by Seymour Barab. I got a 2010 CD reissue of the whole cycle, but aside from the composer and the countertenor, there is no indication of who else is playing. I am getting old enough to have mortality-related regrets. If Seymour were still alive (he would be turning 100 in January), I could call him on the phone and ask him. But I didn't know about his setting of these poems from A Child's Garden of Verses until last week, and hadn't heard them until today.
You can find all the songs in the cycle here. It seems to be one of those entries put on YouTube as a "host" for ads, unfortunately.

"Having written"

Before I started writing music, I had a talk with a composition student about writing music. He told me that he enjoyed having written music, but did not particularly enjoy writing it. Once I started writing music myself, I found the process itself far more interesting than the satisfaction of "having written." There are some pieces that I am happy to have written, many, in fact, but the real creativity and the real satisfaction comes in the putting of one note after and against another.

I suppose that we are all wired differently.

The big problem comes when you have written a lot of music, as I have, and have little motivation to engage in the process of self promotion, which has been elevated to the status of an art in itself. A person gifted in the art of promotion can make anything seem appealing, no matter how useful, beautiful, or worthwhile it actually is. But a person without the drive or the means to promote his or her music this way can feel the act of "having written" as something negligible.

In the years before the internet, composers had music festering in drawers and files. Now it can fester in plain sight on publisher's computer hard drives or in online libraries, amid hundreds of thousands of perfectly good pieces that other composers have written.

Mild success can give a person hope, but success always seems relative. Seymour Barab always felt let down when his efforts to promote his excellent work (and it remains excellent work) proved unsuccessful. The fact that his Little Red Riding Hood was performed constantly didn't mean much to him, but the fact that his more recent theater work could not get a run in an off-Broadway theater did. Fortunately during the very last year of his long life he got some of the acclaim he deserved. When we talked about this his reply was, "I wish it hadn't taken so long."

Seymour was always most interested in what he was working on at the moment. At the end of his life he was working on a set of songs that he wasn't able to finish. It was a set of songs about New York, and the last time I saw him he described the texts as being racy jokes. I remember when he ran out of the specially-sized music paper that he liked to use for songs, and how I found some PDF score paper that could be photocopied into a size that would work for him. He was very happy to be able to get back to work.

Now that Seymour Barab is no longer writing, we have the music that he has written. And there's a lot of it.

Bernard Zaslav: A Special Violist in My Life

Bernard Zaslav, who was born in 1926, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 90. He holds a very special and a very permanent place in my heart. I got to know Bernie extremely well, first through his recordings, then through the internet viola list, and later while working with him on his memoir, The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody.

Shortly after I began working with Bernie on his book I began to wonder if he might know my friend Seymour Barab, who was active in New York at the same time. I casually asked Seymour if he knew Bernie, and Seymour got very excited. He told me that they were in a string quartet together during the 1960s, and that they hadn't been in touch for 50 years (Bernie left New York for Milwaukee in 1968 to play with the Fine Arts Quartet, and Seymour remained in New York for the rest of his life). I gave each the other's phone number, and they renewed their friendship. Seymour read through a draft of Bernie's memoir and made many excellent suggestions. (Michael enjoyed Seymour's comments so much that he used to show pages of Seymour's editing to his college students.)

I have written a lot on this blog about Bernie. He was a remarkable man who, through his playing, his wit, and his kindness, brightened American musical life for much of the 20th century from sea to shining sea (peppered with many concert tours abroad).

You can find the posts I have written about him here, and you can get a copy of his memoir from Amazon, where he tells true tales about the marvelous musical world of the 20th century from the standpoint of one of its brilliant inner voices. The book comes with two CDs that give a musical overview of a remarkable career.

If I were in New York this evening . . .

. . . I'd go to this Manhattan Chamber Orchestra concert of music by Seymour Barab, Richard Auldon Clark, Eric Ewazen, and Michael Schelle.

It's not just because two of the people who wrote the music that's being played (and sung) are friends of mine, but my two friends happen to be fantastic composers. I do know that the program will include Seymour Barab's Songs of Perfect Propriety, settings of texts by Dorothy Parker.

If you go to the concert, please use the comments section to let me (and other Musical Assumptions readers) know what you thought. We just can't trust the regular press to make it to (and write about) all the worthwhile concerts going on in a big city like New York.

UPDATE! Allan Kozinn from the New York Times WAS there!

Here's his review.

Early Autumn Ramble

I suppose that autumn is a collecting time. And this autumn, while I'm waiting for a magnificent event (the upcoming birth of our first grandchild), I have been busy collecting my thoughts.

Mine is a rather consistent musical life, so I find it stimulating when I find myself among young (and not-so-young) ambitious and optimistic musicians who hope to make a mark on the world. I suppose that at age 58 I should be one of the people who has already made her mark, but as a person who started her string-playing life rather late (in my early 30s), I sometimes still feel like I am finding my way around the fingerboard. I sometimes bite off just a little more than I can technically chew, but I feel fortunate never to feel like I am "stuck" at a high technical level, as I was with the flute, with no way to grow musically and nowhere to go.

At this point in my life I am happy to be included in the dance, and I am happy to be able to play with young people who don't seem to have any trouble getting around their instruments at lightning speed. I can play in tune, make the kind of sound I want to make, and more often than not I like what I hear when I put notes together in phrases.

I am relieved that I have not become that kind of an older colleague who exudes a sense of authority and superiority. When I am physically too old to play, I would like my legacy to be that of a good section player and a welcoming colleague who does not judge younger colleagues, except to compliment them when a compliment is in order.

I also never want to project an air of superiority over musicians who play the music I write. As youngsters we are taught to think of the composer of a given work as an authority figure, and we dutifully follow the "rules" that are set out for us. Too often we think of "the composer" as a judge. I would rather be thought of like a tailor who offers attractive practical clothes that fit well, wear well, and are comfortable in all kinds of weather.

The more music I write, the more music of other composers that I arrange, and the more music I play, the more I understand that composers and players are collaborators, even if the composer is not in the room, or is no longer alive.

Dynamics are the essence of musical relativity. My friend Seymour Barab once said that he wished he could just write piano and forte and be done with it. Composers often indicate tempo markings that are too fast (I know I do). Nobody performs with a metronome, so we find our own tempos and allow the composer's indications to act as guidelines. Sometimes slurs, like rules, need to be broken. We all break them from time to time, and for all kinds of reasons.

The idea of success in musical life seems to go hand in hand with ambition and recognition. In order for music to be played, people have to know about it. There are composers who devote vast amounts of time towards promoting their work themselves, and there are composers who devote serious financial resources towards having other people promote their work. Making a living purely from composing commissioned music and having various residencies at festivals and with orchestras seems to be a goal for some composers. It seems to be a measure of success not to have to have a "day job," even if that "day job" is one connected with music. And then there's the pie-in-the-sky idea of being a household name.

(I have to put in a joke from Seymour Barab. He told me, jokingly, that he once thought of changing his name, and he had the perfect one picked out: Leonard Bernstein.)

I used to feel ashamed about not having the skills or the drive to promote my work so that I too can "compete" in the "marketplace," but I no longer feel ashamed about it. Even in my relative obscurity I have come to understand that it is mostly a waste of my time and energy. Thanks to this blog and my Thematic Catalog blog (see I can do a bit of informational self promotion), I make my work available to people who are interested. I also share work for string quartet and string orchestra that is not published and cannot be put in the IMSLP (i.e. arrangements of pieces that are not in the public domain) with people who want to play it (just send me an email message). That's enough for me.

Given the past 500 or so years of published music, there is a lot of music to play. There is also a lot of new music to play, and there are many more composers writing now than there were before computer technology made the physical nuts and bolts of the composition process easier. I think that it is a good thing, because I think that the act of writing music does a lot to help people grow as musicians. It helps musicians to understand what to value in music by great composers from the past like Joaquin, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, and sometimes contemporary composers get lucky and write something of real value.

There is a lot of music that we may play but do not necessarily perform. Consider the Bach Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas. String players devote much of their lives to them, but only a relative handful of string players perform them. We still get a great deal of pleasure out of working on them. The idea of people getting together to play chamber music, and getting pleasure from interacting with one another musically while playing something that I have written is truly the best response I could ever hope for from my (still growing) body of work.

Seymour Barab was born 99 years ago today.

January 9th always means Seymour Barab's birthday to me.

Seymour Barab's La Pizza con Funghi

This hilarious parody of Italian opera by Seymour Barab is performed here (in its one-hour entirety) by the Greensburg American Opera.

Seymour Barab's Blind Date

Seymour Barab is the master of the pocket comic opera!



This comes from the January 27, 2013 performance given by the After Dinner Opera Company.

Seymour Barab's Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey

I can't think of a better way to kick off the New Year than to offer a link to this (freshly-uploaded) performance of the first three numbers in Seymour Barab's one-act opera Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey.

(Please forgive the moment of silence at the beginning. I'm new at this.)

Here is Part 2: "Futility," "Questionnaire," and "In the Cards." Stay tuned for more! There are 18 jokes in all.

Mine Enemy Grows Older

My friend Margie King Barab, who is married to Seymour Barab, was, as a young woman, married to Alexander King (she was his fourth and final wife). Margie is in the process of writing a memoir about her life with King, and after reading the draft of Margie's memoir, seeing Alexander King's paintings hanging on the walls of the apartment where she and Seymour live, and seeing video recordings of "Alex in Wonderland" (which belong only to Margie), I could see how as very young woman coming straight out of Nebraska, Margie might have been charmed by this brilliant man. After reading around 100 pages of Mine Enemy Grows Older, I can understand completely why she was smitten.

The book, published by Simon and Schuster in 1958 (my copy is its sixth printing), comes with two dust covers. The one with the cello and the horse (how did Alex know that Margie would marry a cellist after he died?) is the outer cover, and the grey one is the inner cover. The text on the outer cover reads, "NOTE: If this jacket (the author painted it) is too strong for you, take it off. There's a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath."




The reviewer I linked to above (on The Neglected Books Page) seems to think that the book becomes tiresome towards the end. I'll let you know when I get there. But for the time I remain thoroughly entertained. I'm not quoting anything because I taking the copyright warning seriously. I did not take the above photos: they came from an Amazon listing!

If you can find a copy of this book in a used bookstore, grab it.

See more Barab!

I couldn't resist the pun. Here's a bit more musical Jewish wisdom from Seymour Barab!



You can find your way to more of this feast (there are 14 parts in all) here.

This is the first installment in a celebration of Seymour's 90th birthday this coming January. Singers and actors from all over the world will be contributing their performances to this archive during the coming months. If you might be interested in trying your hand (and other parts of your vocal and acting anatomy) at any of these jokes, send me an e-mail, and I'll send you a PDF of the score.

Classical Barbra

I had a copy of the "Classical Barbra" LP in 1976, when it first came out, and just couldn't resist the opportunity to hear it again after many years, and to write about it here.

Barbra Steisand has a very pretty voice. She sings well in tune, and her singular way of approaching matters of diction works well with French, Italian, and German as well as with English. All of Claus Ogerman's excellent orchestral arrangements are played by the finest New York freelance musicians of the 1970s, and it sounds like the concertmaster, who has a solo in Canteloube's "Brezairola" from Songs of the Auvergne, could be the great David Nadien.

The selections with piano (at least those from the original album: Wolf's "Verschwiegene Liebe" and Schumann's "Mondnacht") have a rather grossly amplified piano to go with Streisand's amplified voice, which makes listening difficult. The balance in "In trutina" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is also odd. The two Handel arias "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Rinaldo and "Dank sei Dir, Herr" are kind of square. Steisand's voice is pretty, and she sings nicely in tune with good diction, but the interpretations are dull.

The best pieces here are Debussy's "Beau Soir," Canteloube's "Brezairola," Faure's "Pavane," which Streisand does as a totally unaffected vocalise, and his "Apres un Reve," Claus Ogerman's "I Loved You," a piece set to a Pushkin poem (in his English translation) that he wrote specifically for Streisand's voice, and two Schubert tracks that did not appear on the original LP.

The piano, probably played by Ogerman, in Schubert's "An Sylvia" and "Auf dem Wasser zu singen" does not have the unnatural treatment that the piano is given in the Wolf and Schumann, and Streisand sings these quite well.

Oh yes. Streisand is billed as a soprano, which is something she definitely isn't. All the music here is transposed into keys that are comfortable for her. There is also (thankfully) nothing that demands vocal technique that she doesn't have, which was a very smart move by the folks at Columbia.

Random afterthoughts:

Imagine if Barbra Streisand sang something by Seymour Barab (and I know he has lots of material that would work for her voice as it is today); you could call it "Barbra does Barab."

Seymour Barab January 9, 1921 - June 28, 2014

I'm too sad right now to write anything coherent, but please read the posts I have written about my dear friend Seymour over the years.

Dangerous Harmonies: The Memoir of Harold Coletta

My friend Seymour Barab gave me his copy of the memoir Martin Goldman wrote with Harold Coletta (1917-2001) in 2004, and I just finished reading it. The introduction to the book ends with a tribute from Seymour:

We met at the first rehearsal of the orchestra in Atlantic City. The picture of Harold that is most memorable, is of his appearance at the swimming pool aboard ship. He was extraordinarily handsome and I was envious. (Still am.)

Over the years we have frequently worked together in recording studios and chamber music ensembles. We have been amicable friends but have not endured any crises together. As most of our situations together have been in conjunction with music, I must add the obvious; that he is exceptional, reliable, sensitive, etc. His viola playing is exemplary. He is an artist and as one, defies comparison. as for the nitty-gritty, he has always remained competitive, because that is the nature of the profession. But he was never drawn into any overt unpleasantness, as is all too common.

I don't know if he is religious, believe no, but his philosophy is certainly Christian in the best sense of the word. I admire him enormously for his intelligence, talent, personality and humanity. I might think of him in the animal world as a lion.

Here is an anecdote. My first job in New York was a Frank Sinatra recording session, around 1948. Harold was sitting next to me. This was my first recording session ever and I was in awe of the proceedings. Standing against the walls around the studio were about a dozen rough looking guys in black raincoats. I asked Harold who the guys were. He gave me a knowing look and said, "Why don't you ask them?"

This is but one of hundreds of quotations from the book that I would love to put on this blog, but since the book is ostensibly still in print I don't want to get in any kind of trouble.

Coletta dictated the memoir to Martin Goldman, and though there are some repetitions (as all dictated memoirs have) and some typographical and grammatical errors (including one that refers to his friend "Paul Child's" home, and mentions that his friend's wife was a gourmet cook, which would lead any reader to think he was talking about Julia, but a later reference reveals that it must have been a misplaced apostrophe since Coletta was clearly talking about the violinist Paul Childs), it is a delightful look at the musical world of 20th-Century New York with stories and portraits that should not fall into oblivion.

Unfortunately 2004 was a lousy year to use a print-on-demand publisher because the Amazon price for the book is OUTRAGEOUS ($329.07 for a new copy and $71 for a used copy), and it is only available through third-party sellers.

I hope that it is possible for Goldman to re-publish this memoir so that it can have a more reasonable price. This book is a prime example of what is wrong with the publishing business. Something of value can be listed in catalogues and be inaccessible at the same time. (You can, however, click on the "look inside" feature and read segments of the book for free, but it will just make you want to read all of it.)

While I'm at it, I heard a CD re-issue of an LP recording of Lowndes Maury's Sonata in Memory of the Korean War Dead played by violinist Myron Sandler with Maury at the piano. It's a spectacular piece, but it was published by Protone Music, which no longer seems to be in the business of selling music. There are two copies of the score listed in the WorldCat: one is at USC and the other is in the New York Public Library. Two copies.

Happy 90th Birthday Seymour!

Seymour Barab is 90 today!