Bill's Drama and Music News and Reviews

I can play vinyl records again; more on Bruckner, Bartok, Holst, Vaughn Williams, Schoenberg; a right-on lesson at church

2012-01-29T17:56:00.000-08:00

Well, after about 14 years (since moving to Minnesota in 1997) of having my vinyl records packed up, I’m playing them again, at least a little. I bought a Numark USN turntable, and indeed rather easily can copy tracks (combined in any way) into iTunes, but only after launching EZ under Applications (loaded from the CD; the Windows version appears a little more complicated than the Mac). It has to be launched for the sound to come through the computer. I bought an iPod Classic, and the synch process is very fast. It does not appear that I have to Eject the iPod separately.

I had also bought at Denon Receiver. Right now, CD’s and DVD’s (including BluRay) pay through the speakers and TV both, under the “DVD” option on the control module. (For some reason, BD sometimes doesn’t work.) The iPod plays under “Dock” and requires a simple adapter to power through the USB. I haven’t tried playing records through “Portable” or “V.Aux” or “Dock” directly (Analog mode), but I’m told that should work. The Receiver does not have specific Phono Jacks.

I had bought another Denon, and found it did not have a Digital Audio Cable input. This one does, but I haven’t tried to play the TV through it yet. The best way to set it up, according to the PDF document (not printed), is to connect everything with HDMI, and then use the Receiver to control everything (including accepting the Cable TV signal from Comcast XFinity and passing it along back to the TV; I guess Verizon FIOS would work the same way, but I haven’t checked). Denon’s documentation leaves something to be desired.

The first piece I recorded as a 1965 Command recording (Pittsburgh Symphony) of Bruckner’s Overture in G Minor. It sounds like it was composed by Franz Schubert to my ear. I noticed slightly uneven pitch from slight off-centeredness of the record – and I think I will notice it more now because I have gotten used to CD’s. I then recorded just one fugue from “Bach’s Swinging Hits”, a Philips record from the 60s.

Today, I captured a Hungaraton recording of Bela Bartok: Rhapsody Op. 1 for Piano and Orchestra (about 20 min), and the “courtly” Suite #1 in E Major, Op. 3, about 30 minutes, which sounds a bit like a symphony. The pianist is Erzsebet Tusa, and the orchestras (Budapest and Hungarian State) are conducted by Gyula Nemeth and Janos Ferencsik, respectively, a recording from about 1968. As for my perception of the Suite, I’ve always perceived the mature “Concerto for Orchestra” (f minor) as rather like a symphony, and my high school “best friend” said that it was his favorite classical work.

The Rhapsody is a bit like a Liszt piano concerto, and seems to be in D minor (from the score). It is post-romantic in tone, and has some octave-like passages that anticipate Bernard Hermann’s music in the film “Vertigo”. Curiously, it ends quietly, rather than offering the listener any sense of triumph. It reminds one of early piano concertos (following Liszt) by d’Albert and Dohnanyi, but seems less intense emotionally and a little more neoclassical.

Now, onto my wild Sunday morning (at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC). First, in the service, the choirmaster made the congregation sing “a capella” a verse of the Vaughn Williams “carol”, “O Sing a Song of Bethlehem”, from “English Country Songs”. I don’t require the congregation’s having to sing without organ accompaniment there before. I noticed a musical oddity in the hymnal a few pages back, a hymn “Down to Earth as a Dove” by Gustav Holst, based the Latin Piae Cantienes, in a key signature with two sharps, but ending on an E Major Picardy Third. The entire hymn appeared to be centered on E, so why the extra sharp? It would not produce a recognized mode (the melodic minor sharps the G also, and the natural minor has just one sharp). Or maybe this really is Dorian mode (starting on D with no black keys) -- like the Sibelius Sixth. But this would be unusual in a hymnal (at least this one). I once wrote some simple exercises on the modes, with manuscripts lost. One time when I was substitute teaching, in a music class, the students had a quiz on identifying modes, and the highest score was 75%. Funny memories.

I, for reasons I won’t go into now, had determined to get to Sunday School on time, for a full “lesson”, and today the content fit my writing perfectly. (So I was out clubbing at the Cobalt Friday night, but not Saturday.)

The teacher showed a notorious lion-zebra painting (link) that is an optical illusion, and went on to present the issue of the actions of children in the Bible, particularly with respect to the birth and raising of Moses, and the actions of his sister (Miriam) and of the pharaoh’s daughter. (If you read the account in Exodus 2, the names aren’t mentioned yet, and the pronoun references are confusing.) This story was preceded with a discussion of the fear by the Egyptians of the Hebrews’ “demographic summer” and order to eliminate male children. That not only sets up the story of Moses but raises the point that a society that goes too far in making young men fungible and expendable (as with a military draft into war) will tend to move toward polygamy and authoritarianism (Warren Jeffs was the extreme end point), and will not be able to maintain the stable family structures (whether “red” or “blue” families) we think “democratic society” needs. The young men who survive will tend to believe they are entitled to as many women as they want without regard to personalized consequences. (Hence, the classic “double standards.) Society will become preoccupied with its own population strength – a major contributor to homophobia (or to crafting scriptures that express it). But here, both Miriam and the king’s daughter had to show interest and compassion for children that had not been their own – an important moral point, too.

To my recollection, the best known work in classical music dealing with Moses is Arnold Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aaron", which was not quite finished, and is based on a very cleverly constructed twelve-tone row. Yet, the music in the "Dance of the Golden Calf" sounds as lush and romantic as Wagner (Lars Van Trier could use it). But as I recall, the opera story starts later than the part about Miriam. It deals with the subtle relationship issues between the brothers and Aaron's role as a "spokesperson". That itself makes an interesting lesson. There was a DVD of a 2006 performance which Netflix no longer has available. I have the CBS CD.

Later, in the sermon (“Exercising Spiritual Authority”), Dr. Haggerty gave a three-step process (“Presence”, “Humility”, “Change”) which seems to limit the effectiveness of those who are “different” in a community. At some point, some must be able to put one’s own self-chosen purposes into synch with the needs of the group (“humility”) and be able to accept a “change” in life-direction when the calling is strong enough. This is a very difficult message in today’s political climate that struggles with the need to articulate and offer “equality” and at the same time having people working together, sometimes with a lot of sacrifice.

After the service, the was even a brief organ lesson, in the style of a music lesson in Werner Herzog's film "Ode to the Dawn of Man" (movies blog, Jan. 25).

New short Andres work available on YouTube, to be performed in San Francisco

2012-01-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

NYC composer Timo Andres recently tweeted the location of a YouTube video performance of his new 7-minute piece “You Broke It, You Bought It”, apparently composed in conjunction with the Living Earth Show (link), and performed at the Mission Science Workshop (link) in San Francisco. The group says the work will be performed Jan. 27 at the Old First Church in San Francisco, along with works by Max Stoffregen and Damon Waitkus. Is "YBIYBI" the policy of an Apple or Best Buy store? That sounds like what we were taught in the 50s as kids.

The work is composed for guitar and xylophone (or instruments that look like these) and some other incidental percussion. The workshop looks quite “cluttered”, as if it were a film studio for horror movies (note the skeleton) -- or is that just for "science", as in a similar museum in Richmond, VA)? I must confess to not knowing the variety of recreational musical instruments. The composition begins very quietly, and remains at a slow pace. The composer has an event in NYC Jan 28 (92Y Tribeca link), missed this one myself.

One of my own sci-fi scenarios envisions that the “protagonist” (me) has passed into another world, and finds himself in a "model railroad" world, placed in an arbitrarily selected history period, in a barracks-like room, with a musical instrument appropriate for the period. The protagonist is challenged to teach a child to play the instrument, partly to show that he is capable of acting as a role model and imposing some discipline. When the music is appropriate for the period, it plays (on the period instrument supplied). When it is too advanced (eg, polytonal or atonal), no sound comes out. The protagonist must sell the other people in the “ashram” of the value of more advanced music. Then he can advance ("get promoted") and live in a later period with more technology again. I actually dreamed this once. Would this make a good movie?

I need to get on with getting my own music entered, but in conjunction with movie scripts (above). One more appointment with Apple Genius next week, and then I think I order Sibelius. I hope I can get my music entered quickly -- and correctly. Looks like I'll need an iPad before long. (See New York Times story today on iPad manufacture in China.)

On the Movies Blog, I have a review (Jan. 23) of Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, with mention of very primitive woodwind instruments, and of the long-short about music-making (rehearsing and teaching), “Ode to the Dawn of Man”.

Pictures: (1) Summit of the Washington and Old Dominion bike trail in northern VA, at Clark’s Gap (yesterday's day trip). (2) Wikipedia attribution, Chinatown in SF.

Local stations present a new piano prodigy; did Beethoven evolve from Haydn, Mozart, or neither?

2012-01-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

Today, NBC Washington ran a story on a seven year-old prodigy pianist, Adrian Romoff. USA Today has a similar story (by Douglas Stanglin) with excerpts from a recital in Atlanta, link here. The white “Schumann” piano made for an interesting sight.

NBC showed him playing some of the first movement from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #20 in G, Op. 49, #2. Not to steal any tropic thunder, this is the second of the “two easy Sonatas”. But I learned and played #1 (in G Minor) during my high school years. The #2 Sonata has a second movement that is a minuet. Romoff said that the work sounded like Mozart, but to me it sounds more like Haydn.

I could go on about this. There is nothing like late Mozart. The end of “Don Giovanni” is chilling, if pre-romantic, but it creates terror in a way never since replicated. The world of Mozart's last string quartets is bizarre, but it doesn’t predict Beethoven. To my ear, however, the early Beethoven quartets do resembled late Haydn. Is this an accepted view?

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #22, Op. 54, in the pastoral key of F Major is weird in that it starts with a Minuet, with a self-halting theme that seems to play “Mother May I” and look for permission to explore its slowly expanding world.

But another two-movement work, #24, Op. 78, is in the rich-dessert key of F# Major, and has always struck me as a more fortunate companion to #22.

Picture: that's me, probably in early 1944 (estate picture)

Holocaust Museum offers chamber CD series: Here is #4 (Korngold Starer, Lees)

2012-01-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers a CD series on Albany Records chamber music called “Darkness & Light”. I picked up #4 Saturday night at Dumbarton, with Steven Honigberg, cello on all items (except the Korngold).

The first work is Romance, Op. 4, with piano (Carol Honigberg) by Leo Warner.

There follows “Song of Solitude” (1955) by Robert Starer, for unaccompanied cello.

Then Robert Stern offers the 10-piece suite “To the Memory of the Children of Terezin”, with piano (the composer) and Paulina Spark, soprano, in some items. These are based on a book of poems by the children in Theresienstadt, the “paradise ghetto”, called “I Never Saw a Butterfly”. Much of Herman Wouk’s novel (and TV series) “War and Remembrance” takes place there, where the Germans constructed a closed world where their prisoners pretended they had some of their old life, before transport to the camps. The music is rather like early Schoenberg, rather post-Mahler. The last song of this cycle ends a lush fortissimo, which is unusual in post-romantic or expressionistic song cycles.

There follows “6 Piano Pieces on Don Quixote” by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1909, the same year as the Mahler Ninth, with a similar harmonic and polyphonic palette, but on the solo piano).

The last item is the lush Piano Trio #2, “Silent Voices”, by Benjamin Lees (15 min), which settles down into silence only at the end.

Greenberg's model railroad show in VA is smaller than WGH

2012-01-22T20:01:00.000-08:00

I visited the Geenberg’s Train and Toy show in Fredericksburg, VA today (link).

I see that I reported on my main blog about WGH, or World’s Greatest Hobby, Jan. 23, 2010, and Roadside America in PA here on May 11, 2011.

The Greensberg show is smaller than WGH, and they layouts were not as adventurous. The most interesting concept probably belonged to the Northern Virginia NTrak, which invites model clubs that follow their standards to build their own little villages onto the bigger layout. The result is that the model trains travel through a variety of “dominions”. Today, for example, one section was a model of the countryside around a temple in Japan. Many of the other sections, though, were the typical small town America.

One idea would be to set up the sections as slices of the same community in various time periods of history, with the train running through a model of space-time (in a trigonometric form around a circular layout). An alien civilization could set up a planet this way (with an annular civilization on a planet caught in tidal lock), and place people in a time-slice appropriate for the person. Only the devices appropriate for the period could work in a particular section. Music more advanced than possible at a particular time could not make sounds. Abducted people living in the model railroad could graduate from one time pie-slice to the next by mastering the skills (including people skills) of earlier times. Anyone want to try this as a concept for an indie sci-fi film? Maybe even an arena stage play.

Another group represented historical interests in the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad, a freight-only short line that ran from Alexandria to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 1950s, now replaced largely by a bicycle trail.

Here's some "drag racing" with model locomotives:

Dumbarton Concerts: the Brahms Trio #1 in B Major, and a lot of cello-piano work (Schumann's "folk" miniatures)

2012-01-21T21:50:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, January 21, the Dumbarton Concerts at the Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown in Washington DC performed the a chamber concert (“Ode to the Cello”) with the Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio. The artists are Audrey Andrist (piano), James Stern (violin), and Steven Honigberg (cello).

I’ll discuss the second half of the program first. It was the Piano Trio #1 in B Major, Op. 8, by Johannes Brahms, composed in white-hot youth at 21 and then revised three decades later.

All the themes in the work are familiar, and I think the figure in the scherzo (second movement) found its way as a similar motive in the last movement (minor) of my own A Major sonatina (age 14). B Major (five sharps) is an odd key for a major work, and I wonder how well it fingers on the cello or violin (compared to C Major, or D Major, the most popular key tonality for the violin). (I think Haydn wrote one symphony in B Major, and it may be the one called "The Razor".) The first movement opens with a heroic theme (reminding one of the First Piano Concerto). Toward the end, the movement, as performed, comes almost to a stop before a triumphant conclusion. The B minor scherzo is, as I said, familiar. The slow movement, Adagio, is again in B Major, when I think a different key (maybe E-flat) would have been appropriate. (Brahms’s first Piano Concerto goes D Minor, D Major, D Minor-Major without varying.) Triple times are common. The finale is “another” Hungarian rondo ending not in triumphant major, but in B minor, reversing the romantic practice of the Picardy Third. (I did the same thing in my 4-movement A Major Sonatina, ending in A Minor. Mendelssohn did the same with the Italian Symphony, after the great peroration at the end of the Third.)

Here’s a YouTube video of the first movement performed at Yale University in December 2010 by the Temple Street Trio (not this concert), link. The coda is really triumphant. This work seems like it wants to be a piano quintet. I think the writing anticipates the youthful and triumphant C Minor (with Picardy ending) quintet, Op. 1, by Ernst von Dohnanyi.

I was fortunate enough to sit by a piano student who said that to him, music needs to always have "motion". There were a few places in this performance of the Brahms (especially the slow movement) where all sense of movement seemed to stop.

Before the intermission, there was no violin, "just" cello and piano. Again, “LIFO”, the first “Act” concluded with Robert Schumann’s “5 Pieces in Folk Style” (“Funf Stucke im Volkston”). These are rather like songs without words than inventions, which Schumann is noted for in his miniatures, which many people think represent his best work.

The first part of the program comprised “transcriptions”. This is not my favorite art form. The concert started by a transcription from Maurice Gendrom of “La Folia” by French Baroque compose Marin Marais. This is contemporary to Bach but sounded a bit perfunctory, yet rather crudely effective. (It is not Bach!) Wikipedia appears to have the staff notation of the theme here.

I’m not sure of Marais composed all the “variations” of this 12-minute piece for viol, using complicated fingering to generate the effects when unaccompanied, or if Gendrom composed the variations. The Folia is supposed to be a “fertility dance”, which adds to the irony of the piece. You may be able to play it from this page.

There followed a transcription of “Rosicrucian” Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, then two songs by Antonin Dvorak (from “Songs my mother taught me” and then “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka). Finally the duo performed Catalan-Spanish composer Gaspar Cassado’s lively and mildly polytonal “Dance of the Green Devil” (“Danse do diable vert”).

I wonder why pianists who accompany other instruments use sheet music with page turners (they are starting to use iPads) whereas soloists must memorize the music.

Let me add one more personal note. When I was forced to leave William and Mary in 1961 (details on my main blog), a friend wanted me to compose a cello sonata for him. He even wanted two movements and for it to be in B-flat, which was not a key he usually liked. I have never written it, but recently I started some sketches on paper, with polytonal tension between D Major (cello) and B-flat (piano) to start. I could see how the process of composition could generate a time-lapse sci-fi story, mapping to a "progressive dinner party" encounter with other people on another planet.

The Church lobby has a sale of paintings by “Art Enables” (link for details and prices) . There was one interesting painting of the Washington Mall with a menacing cloud approaching the Capitol from the East, threatening to engulf everything in its path. (Photo just above is mine, taken from Monument in 2007; August smog is engulfing the city in real time.)

(First picture: No, I didn't bike into the City, but I ought to get up to it.)

One other matter: Let's hope that Dumbarton will have some more music from its Composer in Residence, Tudor Dominik Maican, who attends (graduated?) Indiana University and grew up in Potomac MD.

"FAME" advances music education in Maryland, DC area schools

2012-01-11T17:52:00.000-08:00

Harris’s Heroes on WJLA, ABC Affiliate in Washington, aired a story about a music education program in the Prince Georges County MD school system called “FAME”, or Foundation for the Advancement of Music and Education, website here. The buzzword for the group is “Music is central”. The group appears to focus in Maryland and the Washington DC area. The WJLA excerpt emphasized jazz and percussion.

The WJLA link is here.

"Jersey Boys" at the National Theater in Washington DC

2012-01-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

Tonight, Jan. 5, I attended a performance of the jutebox musical “Jersey Boys” at the National Theater in Washington DC. The run ends soon.

The formal title is “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons”. The musical is set up in four scenes, one for each season (starting with Spring), each narrated by a different principal of the Four Seasons band of the 60s, with all the music coming from songs by Bob Gaudio.

The four “movements” are narrated in turn by Tommy DeVito (John Gardiner), Bob Gaudio (Preston Truman Boyd), Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), and Frankie Valli himself (a virile Joseph Leo Brawie). There is a triumphant epilogue as the group reunites (as young men out of a time machine) at the Rock

The docudrama style turns to tragedy in the second half. The group gets in financial trouble, gets put in jail (didn’t think that should happen for debt), and bailed out by a loan shark. But then at the end Frankie’s daughter, the “fallen angel”, dies of a drug overdose. But ironically Frankie himself is almost “the angel” of the group, despite or perhaps because of his deft dealings with the mob. (This is my second straight Broadway musical, following “Sister Act”, to deal with the mob in comic ways.)

The music gathers momentum in the Summer segment, with some of the most familiar numbers like “Sherry”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, and “Walk Like a Man”

In a winter where the movies have offered “The Artist” and where the effect of copyright on creativity is being hotly debated, the musical is a welcome adventure into the world of group “creativity”, in an earlier generation – where organized crime could target young groups all too easily to “help them out”. The musical numbers, in a kind of punk rock style (in a deliberately shrill and high-pitched voices, ironic given the virility of the young men), which sometimes becomes romantic and expressive, are all very familiar. I remember hearing many of them in the barracks when I was in the Army in the late 60s.

There is some social commentary, as when Massi says he pretended to be an uncle to his kids so he could cheat (a thought which goes both ways). There are some wisecracks about conflicts between being in the performing and creative arts and raising families.

The National Theater has three balconies and is not very deep; I was in the top balcony and found some of the top of the stage (where art work is shown) hidden. The prosceniums cut off the width of the stage, when compared to others, and reduce the aspect ratio.

I have previously seen “Canterbury Tales: Part 2” and “Les Miserables” at the Nationla.

British film producer Graham King has acquired the rights to make the film version of “Jersey Boys” for GK Films. IMDB has little information for the 2014 planned release. GK has worked with a number of Hollywood studios and distributors, in both big budget and art-house mode. It would sound likely the Columbia Pictures and the renewed MGM would be interested. (I like lions.) A film version would cost plenty, well over $100 million to make well. Would the director of "The Artist" (Michel Hazanavicius) make a good choice? Also, would someone make a film about ‘Nsync and its “Popoddysey?” (which I saw in Minneapolis in 2001)? Justin Timberlake just “took the dive”; maybe now is the time.

The official site for the Jersey show is here.

YouTube from Broadway.com:

First picture: The National Theater in a backdrop from Occupy DC at Freedom Plaza.

Below: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, wikipedia attribution. My last visit to the area was in 2010, but I have not yet been able to visit the museum. I visited Cleveland a lot in the summer during boyhood.

Why do Broadway shows charge $10 for a soft drink in concessions? Even movie theaters still charge less than 5.

LDS Washington Festival of Lights concert:: the crowd was huge Christmas night

2011-12-25T19:47:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Day evening, I visited the (“free”) 34^th Annual Festival of Lights on the Washington Temple Grounds at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints just north of the Beltway in Kensington MD, website here.

The forty minute evening concert (7 and 8 PM) was a Christmas carols recital by Todd Thatcher, with a Steinway piano, drums, guitar (or ukulele) and flute band. (Different artists perform every night.)

I had never been in the auditorium before, and it is impressive.

The event started right at 7 PM with a two minute "Imax" short film on Christmas at LDS with the idea that "people are more important than things."

The pianist seemed to be reading a “score” consisting of lyrics and chord instructions, but no staves. I believe Apple Logic can print scores in this fashion.

One of the carols was about Joseph, where he sings that he is not the father of his wife’s child, but the child will be his anyway. This idea has always been controversial and stimulates many sermons. I doubt the many kids in the audience could have grasped the psychological edge of the carol. But at one point Todd went over to the pianist and “corrected” him. I’ve never seen this happen in a public concert before, but I am used to the more formal behavior at classical concerts.

The crowd was very large, and the Visitor’s Center scheduled another performance at 9 PM. I was surprised that the crowd was so large Christmas night.

I also visited an international exhibit of Nativity art, and the line was long.

There was one Christmas tree decorated with small paintings by a 19th Century Czech artist Mikolas Alem. I wonder if there any possible relation to my father's family, which finally came over to the US in the 1880s as Baptist.

The art work at the Visitor's Center will normally inspire a visit. There is one mural that seems to suggest extrasolar planets.

Finally, I've always loved Facebook-blue Christmas lights (I have normal color vision).

Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC gives "Red & Greene" Concert for Holidays at GWU

2011-12-17T15:54:00.000-08:00

We all remember the typical colors for holidays, and they overlap. Red and green for Christmas; orange and black for Halloween; red or pink and white for Valentine’s; red, white and blue for the 4^th; maybe yellow for Easter, nothing with purple (maybe Gay Pride Day – lavender). You need to cover the Rainbow spectrum.

So this weekend, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC hosts its “Red and Greene” concert at Lisner, link here.

The Greene is in fact soloist Ellen Greene, who alternates (singing with a cello soloist Stephen Erdody), the Rock Creek Singers, and the full 200-member male chorus, which donned many outfits, changing quickly.

The highlights came in the second half. The GMCW sung “A Nutcracker’s Christmas” by Dan Goggin and Tom Sarsany, with eight nuns (echoing Broadway’s “Sister Act”, reviewed here Dec. 1). There were some lyrics to the effect, "It's better [or "more blessed"] to give than to receive". I can imagine what some of my Army buddies at Fort Eustis (back in 1969 -- but they more or less knew I was gay) would make of this. At the end, there was a Winter Party – a White Party, literally, as to the uniforms – with seventeen dancers in mild gender bending. The Party included a rendition of Lady Gaga's "Born this Way".

The number “Red & Greene” opened, by Marvin Hamisch and Rick East.

Christian Klilovits conducted.

At the beginning of the concert, three DC area high schools with students in attendance were mentioned. One of these was West Potomac High School, in Fairfax County, south of Alexandria. I've discussed my own experiences there on the main "BillBoushka" blog July 27, 2007 and the Issues Blog Nov. 14, 2010.

First Baptist Church in Washington holds largest Christmas concert ever; Arlington Church performs Britten; notes on NYC "Sleeping Giants"

2011-12-11T18:42:00.000-08:00

Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011 was a big day for church Christmas concerts. And this year two concerts provided a valuable exposure to modern classical music.

The Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington VA presented the thirty-minute cantata “A Ceremony of Carols”, Op. 28, by Benjamin Britten (1942), for three –part female chorus. Soloists, and a big harp, based on a book of medieval poems, “The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems” by Gerald Bullett, in eleven sections (processional, recessional in Latin, nine poems in varying forms of Old English – more challenging than what we had to read in high school literature). Trinity offered adult male voices from age 16-70, doubling the parts in unison, so the effect was to give the sound more bass and sense of mass. The harp Interlude is quite substantial, like a piano prelude, a bit pastoral. I think William and Catherine probably know this piece well, but I don't think it go selected for "The Wedding".

The minister, in a Children’s story, explained the significance of Gaudete Sunday, when the pink Advent candle is lit. This is a time when people may need encouragement, even of a personal nature, she said.

At 4 PM today, the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC gave its largest Christmas Candlelight service ever. The service ran longer, about 95 minutes, and included more music of a modern concert nature, certainly trying to attract the interest of the DC music community.

The service opened with a first-ever instrumental section. Dr. Lawrence Schreiber performed an organ “sonatina” called “Il est ne le devin enfant” by Marcel Dupre, ending in a majestic but conventional fugue. (Remember that composer’s notorious and bombastic “Cortege e Litanie”?) The Brass Ensembles and Handbell choirs alternated groups of familiar carols, mostly arranged by Jim Lucas.

The conventional carol service followed,, with "O Come All Ye Faithful" as the processional. (I was ready for Sir Hubert Parry's "I Was Glad" -- really; It's loud, and virile!) But it would quickly offer major highlights. The offertory was a piano solo “Noel Novelette” by Emma Lou Diemer, performed by Lawrence Schreiber.

The Runnymede Singers (Facebook site), conducted by Cory S. David, performed carols by John Rutter (“Candlelight Carol”) and Mark Miller (“Christ Is Born”).

The Friday Morning Music Club Chorale (link for club) performed “Sweet was the song” by Jay Althouse, and then some plainsong. I recall the Club from piano lessons in the 1950s.

The service closed with Deborah Miller, soprano, and the combined choirs singing the closing passages from The Christmas Cantata, bringing the event to a rousing (or perhaps rowdy) close. “There will be dissonance, there will be polytonality, there will be constant tension in the music.” The final fortissimo chord has a dissonant note in it.

One year ago today, which was Saturday Dec. 11, 2010, I “Amtaked” to NYC to hear a pre-purchased concert in which Timo Andres performed his “It Takes a Long Time to Become a Good Composer” (as I recall, sponsored by the Metropolis Ensemble). Today, I found his discussion of its relationship to Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” on a “Sleeping Giants” page at WQXR, here. The comment that Schumann was at his best with miniatures and wrote in “fractals” is interesting. (An onion is an example of a fractal, isn't it? But so is a tree. Maybe self-similarity generates entire universes.) Schumann is not Brahms, he is Schumann – but he could turn on grandeur with big forms sometimes: the big Piano C Major Fantasy (yes, the March is a "miniature"), and my favorite Second Symphony (C Major) – not just the famous Romanza, but the telescopic Finale, which attains incredible grandeur at the end with very simple manipulations of a very personal theme (it was probably a song).

My own mother, then 97, had gone into a Hospice the day before (Dec. 10) – but I made the Concert with a one day trip, the concert experience (overlooking Central Park, almost literally) becoming a kind of personal memorial. The closing of the Schumann #2, through the Hospice bedside sound system, with me there, was the last music she would hear. She would pass away Dec. 14.

I’ve gotten to know Timo's “Shy and Mighty” from the Nonesuch CD over the past year and a half, and I now think the work is really stronger if played at once, and that it ought to be choreographed. A one-hour ballet experience with a two-piano suite in many short movements, all stylistically and philosophically related, makes real sense to me. (No, there’s no part for a “Black Swan”, and it’s not quite a “Rite of Spring” – although Stravinsky’s ballet sounds very compelling on the piano, actually – as movies about it have shown.) This might be the best way to get it more performances, especially on college campuses, and outside NYC. There are many small choreography collaborations around the country. I even remember, in ninth grade, that my chorus teacher had composed a piece called "Ballet Music" which she brought in one time and played for me.

Readers may enjoy this blog posting from June 2011, "Get Classical" -- discussion of doing both performing and composing (after introducing the "Ecstatic Music Festival").

"The Crucible", by Arthur Miller, presented by Washington-Lee High School (Arlington VA) in an emotional production

2011-12-09T20:15:00.000-08:00

Washington-Lee High School in Arlington VA, from which I graduated in 1961 (old building shown below), presents “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller as its “fall play” this year in its new theater (in a new high school building). It’s directed by Keith Cassidy.

The program notes discuss well the way the play presents, with a setting in Massachusetts in 1692 with the Salem witch trials, an allegory to McCarthyism which was in full swing in 1952 when Miller wrote the play.

It’s amazing today, when anyone can write and self-publish and self-produce on the Web (and the current bill in Congress SOPA puts that in jeopardy – see my “BillBoushka” blog), that people could be blacklisted from working in Hollywood at all if they didn’t confess “something” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and then “name names”. The same sort of thing went on for years in the military with its campaign to pretend it did not have gays, even worse under “don’t ask don’t tell”, recently repealed.

The production contained the usual four Acts (I think without the addendum near the end of the second Act -- ), and lasted about 2-1/2 hours with the intermission (which gave the presentation the character of two acts with two scenes each, as in opera). The "wide screen" stagecraft was extensive (plenty of crosses and nooses), and the acting (sometimes off-stage in balconies), particularly the “screaming”, passionate. Most of us know the tragic end, where John Proctor (Jeffrey Warren) tears up his confession in order to avoid the public shaming for something he did not do. The phrase “hang ‘em high” occurs (itself the name of a famous western). The gallows come down in silence, but it is a kind of American Lynching. Proctor’s actor is rather heavily made up for the final scene, with watercolors on his wrists to simulate blood. A lot of cameras went up when he appeared for the scene. I remember in seventh grade feeling uncomfortable about putting goo make-up on my hands for the innocent musical "The Sunbonnet Girl".

The chamber music score, by Connor Browne, is dark in tone, and contains a figure that reminds one of the slow introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. I was ready for the Allegro.

The audience included many members of the Cappies (Aug 5, 2007, "Senioritis"); I'm not sure if they helped produce it.

When I substitute taught a few years ago, I had an English class where the audio from the last act of the drama was played from a simple CD. There are lots of discussions centered around moral abstractions. In the play, I thought a caught a line about having to have permission to write about someone in a pamphlet (imagine that on today’s Internet). It also seemed as though the townspeople make other people’s marriages and relationships very much their business, much as in soap operas.

There was a major film in 1996 from 20^th Century Fox, directed by Nicholas Hytner, of the play, which I saw when it came out at the old National Amusements (now Rave) property in Merrifield, now gone. Daniel Day-Lewis, so completely body-shaved earlier for “The Last of the Mohicans” (another history lesson) is Proctor, and Winona Ryder (of shoplifting shame later) is Abigail. I wonder how much of the cast has seen the film (PG-13, just barely).

Some kids (AviOnyx) made a spoof of the last scene (as another high school English project), emphasizing the significance of publishing Proctor’s confession (as if on Facebook in public mode). I guess this is a “derivative work”.

Arthur Miller lived to about 90 (until 2005) and was incredibly prolific as an author. He was Marilyn Monroe's last husband, and appears as a character (played by Dougray Scott) in the Weinstein Company's "My Life with Marilyn" (reviewed on my Movies blog on Dec. 6).

Christmas pagaents: simple, homemade stagecraft and music making

2011-12-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

Church Christmas pageants are not Broadway, but they’re still 3-D. Today, the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC presented, after the Sunday brunch, “A Living Christmas Card” as part of the “Family Life Christmas Program”, with murals of the manger, wisemen visit and shepherds, and a trumpet solo “Gesu Bambino” by Pietro A. Yon.

Earlier, in a sermon “The Mountain Climbing Mandate”, pastor Jeffrey Haggray made an allusion to the film “Shame” (movies, Dec. 3) by mentioning the libertarian concept of “private choices” as often made without empathy or social connection.

Later today, in Arlington VA, the congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on 16h St (2^nd Ward) and Trinity Presbyterian Church held a joint “The Sounds of Christmas: Carols of the Season”. There was a puppet show as part of the children’s story. There were two musical items outside the usual Christmas carols: the Combined Choirs sang “Night of Silence” by Daniel Kantor, and Trinity Tollers played (on bells) the Introduction to “The Ringing in of Christmas” by William Payn.

The LDS hymnal does not name music composers of the individual hymns, and many hymns, while familiar, seem to have fewer verses.

"Sister Act": a diva "takes the hint" from a convent (Whoopi Goldberg's musical)

2011-12-01T21:04:00.000-08:00

Broadway musical, as an artistic form, is different from plays and film in the sense that the music and visual stage effects take off on their own, in a kind of abstraction. That can mean that eventual film adaptation won’t have anything like the stage effect.

It’s almost impossible to see “The Book of Mormon” reasonably, but “Sister Act”, produced by Whoopi Goldberg and Stage Entertainment at the Broadway Theater, also starts off delving into the ambiguous morality of religious conviction. The music is by Alan Menken, and has several songs that are very familiar, at least one of which commonly plays in (gay) discos and even shows up in Apple Loops. The lyrics are by Glenn Slater and Cherri and Bill SteinKellner. And imdb shows a film from 1992 from Touchstone Pictures and director Emile Ardolino with Whoopi as Delores. It does not appear to have the same music.

Now, on stage, Patina Miller plays the diva, who witnesses a mob hit accidentally and needs “witness protection”. She finds it in a convent, where the Mother Superior tells her to “take the hint” (that phrase could have become a song) about her values. That is to say, more than perform in life and even pay her dues, she was to go along with God’s plan and be prepared to sacrifice for others, according to a variable personal calling.

But the diva’s values become infectious to the convent, and the comedy takes off, and the songs soar as the sisters sing, accommodating their spiritual values with earthly happiness. Indeed, “Spread the love around.” At one point, two “bachelors” (a gay couple – J. Edgar and Clyde, maybe) plan to “buy the church” – but they’re so pleased with the collections the diva generates that the church survives. It gets its new building.

The stage effects with the Virgin Mary (who seems a bit like a golden calf idol) and all the variable colors dazzle at the end.

Tonight, the theater was honoring World AIDS Day with a special collection. (The seats for the show are reasonably priced. But $10 for a coke at concessions is just too much.)

The website is this.

Music lessons with Apple Loops

2011-11-29T20:04:00.000-08:00

Well, here I go, giving myself “piano lessons” – not exactly. I’ve starting to go through the Logic Express booklet on the Mac before deciding what score-management system (Sibelius or Finale) to get to carry on with my own music.

Yup, you can have fun with Apple Loops, -- that is, “Apple loops audio files” and “software instrument Apple Loops files” and combine these with original material in almost any fashion.

My main interest is in recording and more professionally producing my piano works, and at least two orchestral scores. I hardly think pre-mixed clips will fit into my own plans.

I suppose that when one buys Logic, one buys the right (from copyright perspective) to use these pre-mixed effects and thematic elements – but it’s “amateur mixing” of music that has become controversial in the fight over piracy, even though it’s probably fair use in many cases where a derivative work is created that is very transformative relative to the original (like a variations and fugue on someone else’s theme in classical music).

Here’s (first picture) what the first effort looks like. I can hardly protect it.

Sermon discusses Mozart's Requiem, and makes points about content integrity relevant to copyright and i.p. debate today

2011-11-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

Today, at the Cathedral of Hope (A Congregation of the United Church of Christ since 2007) in Dallas, Rev. Jo Hudson spoke about the suffix “Thine is the Kingdom” to the Lord’s Prayer, but what was interesting to me was how she applied a similar concept from the world of music to her sermon.

She gave the example of the Mozart Requiem in D Minor, K 626. It still strikes me today as one of the most energetic and moving requiems, sometimes even more so that the opulent romanticism of Verdi and Berlioz. Actually, the Cherubini Requiem in the same key makes a good comparison.

She mentioned the completion of the work by Franz Xaver Sussmayr, to make the point that an addendum to original source of any passage of literature or music does not detract from the integrity of the original.

She mentioned the Lacrimosa as a favorite passage, but it does appear that considerable portions, especially the concluding Agnus Dei, were composed by Sussmayr. In fact, the Mozart Requiem, as performed, perhaps is the only Requiem to end triumphantly (although in many requiems the Sanctus and Offertorium are rowdy and end loudly).

In fact, Mozart’s Requiem was commissioned by a count to commemorate the death of his wife, and the particular count was thought to try to claim credit for the music himself. In Mozart’s day, composers usually could not compose and get music published with commissioning or subsidy from others, and often had to please “customers” with their work. All of this seems to feed into the debate on copyright infringement raging today (as with SOPA on my main blog).

Another great example of a musical completion is that of Puccini’s opera Turandot, by Franco Alfano, which sounds pretty seamless (and also triumphant). I saw Turandot at the Dallas opera in 1980, right after Reagan’s election. I still remember the night.

The Cathedral of Hope service today did include a wonderful offertory of its own, the cantata “To the Ends of the Earth”, by Lowell Alexander (words Steve Amerson) with Paul Mason as soloist, with the Sacntuary Chorus and Orchestra.

Music therapy can be helpful to Alzheimer's patients

2011-11-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

Today, in teaching a Sunday School class at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC, a physician mentioned the value of music sometimes reported in improving the lives of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

The University of Kansas (from which I got an MA in Math in 1966) has a study showing that patients otherwise regressing maintaining social function during music therapy sessions. Here is the Sage Journal abstract link.

Here’s another piece on music palliation from Bryn Mayr College in Pennsylvania, link.

Indeed, relation to music seems to be hard-wired into human genes: it’s the brain’s most important example of aggregating experience over time and creating emotion or sensation at the moment.

Assisted living centers and nursing homes often bring in musical performers, and this can be an important source of income for musicians (try this Facebook group). The tone of musical entertainment at the Jefferson (Arlington VA) when my mother was in rehab after a stroke in 2009 was quite light and comical, however.

Music does not have to be that well-written or developed to stimulate. I’ve noticed that in church services people will sing the same hymns in many verses, repeatedly, without becoming bored by the repetition. That’s why sometimes it could be used for immoral purposes, as during the Third Reich (and the conscience of composers like Furtwangler and Richard Strauss could make for another blog post).

It was noted that only about 75% of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a staple of performed choral music for a century, is actually Mormon.

My D Minor Piano Sonata (1960): posted old manuscript posted online

2011-11-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

As a step in reconstructing and rehabilitating the music I composed earlier in my life, I’ve uploaded by Piano Sonata #2, D Minor, composed at age 16 (around 1960), 27 pages, into Adobe image format, here. It should be possible to view it on an iPad by page.

The Sonata is in three movements. The first is an “Allegro commodo”, d minor; the second is a Nocturne, Lento Placido, G Major; the third has a cadenza-like introduction in G Minor leading to a Rondo, D minor with episodes in B-flat and G Minor and a Picardy D Major, triumphant conclusion. I see that I had blogged about this work Sept. 13, but I want to do a little of my own constructive criticism here.

In the first movement, the Development Section starts normally enough and progresses naturally through a variety of key sequences for about 26 measures, before turning violent and cadenza-like, hanging in oscillation between D minor and the dominant A Major for about 40 measures (although it varies tempo, from ¾ to 4/4 and even one measure in 5/4 before recapitulation. Also, the opening measures seem like a reduction of the opening of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, as if to mock it. Maybe that’s OK. I’ll come back to that.

The slow movement is in the subdominant G, a little unusual for a minor-keyed work, because it throws the second subject back to D Major. I remember, when composing it, that I thought this was original, because so often composers go to the relative Major (here, F) too easily.

The introduction to the Rondo may seem rather conventional, but it is when I get to the Rondo itself that I have the most interesting problem.

In Vivace 4/4 (really 12/8), there are two measures of a fugal subject in d minor, and then a switch to A minor to continue a fugal idea with a counter subject. But experiments with Bach die here. Then I stay in an A major cadence here with the rest of the subject, sliding into a Hanon-like arpeggio structure. But the rest of the opening subject (the next 12 measures) going from G minor through E-flat back to D minor seem logical enough. The second subject (the rondo alternate) will become the big tune at the end and has a lot of embedded variety (I think there is a theme a little similar in the Tchaikovsky Concert Fantasy in G). When I return with the first subject, it becomes very abridged, and the second return of it morphs into a restatement of the cadenza-like violence at the end of the development in the first movement.

Is this (letting the opening subject hand in the dominant key) trite? A virtuoso pianist, dispassionate and cocky, could pull it off. What appears to me now is that maybe I had a “duty” to continue the fugato. I could use this kind of harmonic scheme: “ d d a a F# F# B Bg#f A f# a# A”. But then the harmonic progression in the development section of the first movement ought to follow suit, so that the modulatory scheme matches the subject. Then, for the triumph on the coda finale, re-use this scheme, and come crashing down in D Major “FFF” only in the last two measures or so. (I could also change the Rondo subject my simply alternating tonic and dominant, fugato style.)

I believe I performed the whole work, not fast enough, in the spring of 1960 to my second music teacher’s class in front of about 10 students, on her Baldwin piano in north Arlington. I had a “girl friend” of sorts in the class who actually could make comments about the development sections – but I don’t think the criticism led to tonal monotony. I think I played the second movement once in a recital (at a local church) that spring. With all my schoolwork as a high school junior (the hardest year), with a term paper on J F Cooper and Virginia's hardest US History teacher, I don't know how I had time to hand-scribe this manuscript. Did I do the work at the kitchen table, like I wrote term papers? I don't recall now.

My musical ear at the time was influenced by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s moody Piano Concerto #3, also in d minor. That work tends to hang in keys for a while during virtuosity, particularly in the famous “ossia” candenza in the first movement, performed here on YouTube (link). Readers may enjoy this musical analysis of both cadenzas. At the time, I had the RCA Victor 1957 recording with Van Cliburn and Kondrashin conducting the Symphony of the Air, with the Ossia cadenza. I didn’t find out that the lighter one was actually more often played (even by Rachmaninoff) until much later. (In fact, the Ossia could almost function as a separate Op. 32 prelude, a bit like the concluding D-flat Prelude, which I did play in high school.) This evening I played a CD of a 1982 recording by Zoltan Kocsis with the San Francisco Symphony (Edo de Waart) on Philips, which uses the "lighter" one.

As for "hanging in the dominant", there are many other examples. For much of its first half, the Bach C Major 2-part invention is in dominant G. And some composers tend to overuse relative major when starting in minor. The Chopin B-flat minor Scherzo has this problem, and actually ends in D-flat. (Tchaikovsky solved that problem beautifully when he opened his first piano concerto with a favorite theme and got it out of his system.)

I have a manuscript of the 4 movement Third Sonata (in "C" major-minor), the first three movements composed in 1962, and the sketchier finale (in better shape than I thought) in 1974. The finale needs one more theme to scoop up some momentum toward the end to justify its final outbursts. I may post this work this way later. But then I’ll have to get my work entered onto the MacBook, probably with Sibelius.

Automatic copyright permission is granted for immediate downloading and saving of the manuscript for personal and informal use. By the way, the PDF was created from a scanner at a FedEx Kinkos. One employee told me she could not copy music (even my own), but I could do it myself on a scanner, which was slow. Another employee a different day was able to do it on a fast scanner as long as I stayed on the premises.

New digital music publishing platform announced (Schott/EAM)

2011-11-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Project Schott New York (PSNY) (associated with European American Music Distributors, or EAM) has announced its formation of a “digital music publishing edition” with this “about” link recently. It writes “Composers of today possess a self-producing capacity that is far beyond the capacities of any other era in the history of notated music.” None of this would have happened without Steve Jobs (see movies blog, Nov. 3).

Visitors will want to peruse the “Blog” (most recent announcement Nov. 1), and especially the FAQ at the bottom of the home page to see how rental of scores for perusal works.

This company will become a major resource in getting new music heard by more people.But the company is obviously selective about the works it accepts. Sometimes individual movements of works are published alone.

Frank J. Oteri has a news story about the group on a web news site called “New Music Box” here

Busoni also has a Hammerklavier-like Sonata; Dohnanyi's lat 2nd Symphony brings back world of Mahler

2011-10-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve written recently about the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata and a similar work by Brahms (Sonata 1), but I found a Piano Sonata in F Minor by Ferruccio Busoni, performed by Bruce Wolosoff, in 1986, on a Japanese Columbia Sony (Music and Arts Programs of America) CD at home.

The work runs about 31 minutes and has three movements. The opening Allegro Risoluto starts with a rising rocket theme and takes us on an adventure. The Andante is really more like a big romantic Adagio. The Finale, after a slow introduction, presents us with an episodic fugue in the spirit of the Hammerklavier, then brings back the rocket theme and builds to a stunning conclusion. F Minor is usually not my favorite key for this kind of work, as the Picardy close leads to a major key seeming to be pastoral in nature. The work sounds a bit like Brahms and is much more German than Italian in character. (Brahms made F Minor work as the key for this Third Sonata, remember.)

Busoni is known for his Piano Concerto in C Major, which has a male chorus in the finale and is one of the longest in the literature (except for Furtwangler’s).

Also, try the 1996 Chandos recording of the Symphony #2 in E Major of Ernst von Dohnanyi. The composer is known for his postromantic youthful masterpieces (the Piano Quintet and sprawling Piano Concerto #1 are both teenage works). The Second Symphony is late, composed in the WWII years when he was in his sixties, but it sounds youthful – but also penultimate. The work spans 50 minutes, and is almost like a middle Mahler symphony. The 20 minute finale is a theme and variations followed by – again – a colossal fugue. It’s back to Bach on steroids.

Boswell Memorial Lecture at William and Mary traces and shows evolution of older ideas about marriage and family values, especially for southern women

2011-10-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

On Oct. 21, 2011, William and Mary GALA started uts 25^th Anniversary Celebration with a Boswell Memorial Lecture (named after the famous historian on the subject of homosexuality and Christianity) with speaker Susan Cahn, Professor of History from the State University of New York at Buffalo, titled “Reading, ‘Riting, Rhythm and Romance: Southern Girls and Sexual Politics”.

The lecture was held in Washington Hall, the languages department, on Jamestown Rd at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. The room was a typical stadium lecture hall, but I can recall taking English 101 in a smaller room in that Hall in that lost semester of fall, 1961, when we read T.S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", with the instructor's saying frankly that it was a poem about sexual impotence (greatly dreaded in that era), and later "The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm, with all that criticism of psychological "symbiosis" (no mention yet of "polarities").

The presentation-lecture was accompanied by many historical still photographs, like those in a Ken Burns documentary, particularly of old animations or cartoons that showed the animus toward desegregation in the South before and throughout the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. (So, no this was not a lecture about Miss Scarlet – how she had it, lost it and got it back, and then lost Rhett—again.)

These pictures reminded one also of the old “filmstrips” that used to be shown in elementary schools in the 1950s to teach social studies. One cartoon in particular, dated around 1950, showed a woman saying she saw nothing wrong with integration in public schools, and then traced the “argument” to “inevitable” mixed dating and mixed marriage, and mixed grandchildren, and then a final frame about “our enemies”. The cartoon had originated in Union County, NJ.

But there were also other slides of high schools, such as school buses and proms, in the segregated south in the 1950s.

Women worked during the WWII effort, of course, but for a while after WWII returned to homemaking. But in the early 1950s, employment opportunities gradually expanded for women, as they had even during the industrial revolution. Some families (both white and black) feared that they would not have grandchildren as daughters slowly returned to the workplace, even before Betty Friedan. Families got fussy about demanding loyalty of their kids to family goals, and both the lack of marriage or marrying the wrong “kind” (race), or premarital sex—all of these were seen as sinking families.

I can recall a Ladies Home Journal article around 1957 that complained that too many women went to college and asked the question, “whom would you rather have a college degree, you or your husband?” Sputnik could change that attitude real fast.

The lecture demonstrated a problem with our use of "logic" in social issues. We assume a result is bad based on ideas that have no grounding in science. Furthermore, we assume that a harmless action by a single person will, if permitted, lead to a situation where others copy the action and the end result is the "harmful" collective situation.

MSN video documents value of music education with a school in FL

2011-10-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

MSN, on a site called "Mom's Homeroom", offered a 5 minute video this morning on the value of music education for other academics. The school at hand was a middle school in Davenport, FL. A voice teacher Mary Anne Suggs said, “the human voice is the most important musical instrument. A male teacher said that music performance teaches 100% accuracy, which certainly translates to math skills.

Here is the video link (not embeddable).

Thomas Pandolfi: review of two CD's

2011-10-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

At the Thomas Pandolfi concert Sunday, I did buy a couple of his new CD’s, on his own label.

One of them (new, dated 2011) has a cardboard cover and no program notes, but introduces Pandolfi as a composer. That is with Pandolfi’s “Improvisation on Six Gershwin Melodies” (about 13 min). He starts with the Rhapsody in Blue in the 1927 solo piano version. He follows with Earl Wild’s “Etude #2 on Gershwin’s ‘Oh Lady Be Good’”, then Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”, and Pandolfi’s arrangement of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “All I Ask of You”.

The other disc (2006) starts with the familiar Piano Concerto in F Major, with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Peter Schmelzer. The performance (and recording) is brilliant, as is the orchestral playing. The overall effect of the performance struck me as a bit Ravel-like. The setting in F Major has always seemed curious to me; I'm used to thinking of F as a "pastoral" key (maybe because of Beethoven's Sixth and Brahms's Third symphonies.) Keys, properly tempered, have real personalities.

He follows with his Song Medley, which he lists here as an “arrangement” rather than a composition, and there are seven tunes here, but the psychological effect is the same as the impromptu on the other disc. It’s typical in the music world to list “variations” or “fantasies” on themes by others under the actual “composer” of the derivative work than the original theme (as compared to transcriptions; with Liszt, the differentiation can become difficult).

He concludes the CD with “Three Songs from The Gershwin Songbook” as Gershwin himself transcribed them for solo piano.

The emotional language of Gershwin, at least in these interpretations, seems to me a bit muted, but in line with a major part of the musical world from the 1920s through WWII. I had a friend early in my career who (a computer programmer and mathematician with professional articles published somewhat related to Navy and subsequent Univac employment) played jazz quite well as an amateur pianist and was quite into the improvisation art.

Pandolfi also has a CD in which he plays the Paderewski A Minor Concerto in a passionate reading (comparable in effect to the Grieg concerto), again with the Moravian Philharmonic, along with works by Godowski, Labunski and Chopin.

Nasseri performs music of Haskell Small on Naxos

2011-10-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

Thursday night, at Strathmore, I picked up an “American Classics” Naxos CD of the music of Washington DC composer Haskell Small, played by pianist Soheil Nasseri, who had given a concert that evening.

The first and main work is a six-movement (29 minutes) piece for narrator and solo piano, “Lullaby of War”, 2007, actually commissioned for Mr. Nasseri, with Martin Rayner, Narrator. The six poem s are by Stephen Crane (“War Is Kind” -- the author is familiar for “The Red Badge of Courage”), Joy Harjo (“No”), Yvan Goll (“Recitative”), Uri Zvi Greenberg (“Naming Souls”), Walt Whitman (“Look Down, Fair Moon”), Paula Tatarunis, “Guernica Pantoum”. The pieces are linked by a blocked-chord but dissonant “prayer theme” reminiscent of Ives.

The second suite (27 minutes) is “Renoir’s Feast” (2005), in sixteen miniatures, which sound like a mix of Poulenc and Ives. It’s called “A Musical Celebration of The Luncheon of the Boating Party” and was commissioned by the Phillips Collection, near Dupont Circle, whose chamber and solo recitals I sometimes attended in the 1960s, in the days before my own military service, when the draft hung over the heads of young men as an obligation to be escaped from, obliquely.

The last composition is “Three Etudes in Sound” (1993): “Layers”, “Swirls and Spikes” and “Sustained”.

The website for the album on Naxos is here.

Here is a video of Haskell Small performing “Fur Alina” by Arvo Part.

Thomas Pandolfi gives major concert to honor Franz Liszt

2011-10-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 9, pianist Thomas Pandolfi gave his annual fall concert at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC.

When I arrived (by slow Metro, with DC having so much transportation shut down this Columbus Day weekend), a piano tuner was working on the Steinway, because some keys were not releasing fully, after the piano was moved and apparently had been exposed to more humidity. I thought about the movie "Piano Mania" (Aug. 26, 2011 on my Movies blog).

The program honors the 200^th Anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt (Oct. 22, 1811).

Pandolfi introduced each composition with some brief remarks.

The program opened with the Piano Sonata in E-flat, K282, of W. A. Mozart, which has the unusual form of starting with the slow movement (like the better known A Major), a practice that Beethoven would sometimes adopt. The Sonata has a pre-romantic feel.

Next followed the Intermezzo in A, Op 118, #2, by Brahms. Pandolfi mentioned the way Brahms started his career with larger sonata-like pieces, and compared the Op. 1 Brahms Piano Sonata to the Beethoven Hammer-Klavier. I’ve discussed both pieces here recently.

He then played the A-flat Impromptu, Op. 90, #4, by Franz Schubert. It actually starts with A-flat minor arpeggios. I remember learning this piece from the Sherwood course when I took piano.

The rest of the program involved Liszt. Before intermission, he played three Liszt transcriptions. First, a Schubert song “The Miller and the Brook”. Next, a song by Robert Schumann, “Dedication” (“Widmung”). And then the slow-motion E-flat Etude after Paganini, which I have heard played as encore at the Kennedy Center without name. Pandolfi said that Paganini was to the violin what Liszt was to piano. (I do recall the G# minor etude after Paganini.)

After intermission, he started with the Consolidation #3 in D-flat. I played this a senior in high school. He compared it to a Chopin nocturne, but it is not quite as sentimental. After all, this is Liszt.

He followed with the massive “Funerailles”, the 7^th of the Poetic and Religious Harmonies, in F Minor. It pays homage to the “Heroic” Polonaise of Chopin, and has the general structure of a Chopin Ballade, but rather dies away at the end instead of ending violently. It also bears a slight relation to the Chopin F Minor Fantasy (previous post). The piano sonorities were overwhelming.

Then he played the famous Liebestraum #3 in A-flat (the first two are rarely played).

There followed the Valse Oubliee (“Forgotten Waltz”) #1, in F#, 1881, which, as it progresses, becomes so chromatic that it approaches atonality. Liszt was looking ahead, almost to Schoenberg, late in life. The work ends on a single note without harmony.

He concluded with the Hungarian Rhapsody #12 in c# Minor. He picked “which” rhapsody at the last moment, preferring one that uses heavy black keys to avoid problems with the piano.

Much of the music in this program was what my father would have called "tuneful". Liszt was my late mother's favorite composer.

Thomas Pandolfi is on YouTube. Here is his video of his playing three Etudes by Chopin.

One other note today: On Piers Morgan, on CNN, the remark was made that Michael Jackson actually was a student of classical music. I've never heard that before.

Strathmore presents recital by Soheil Nasseri, featuring Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata

2011-10-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, Oct. 6, the Mansion at the Strathmore in Rockville, MD presented pianist Soheil Nasseri. Apparently in his early 30s, he has developed the reputation of one of New York’s most prolific pianists in terms of repertoire played, with a heavy emphasis on Beethoven. He has pledge to perform all of Beethoven’s music involving piano by 2020, the 250^th birthday year for the composer.

The concert was performed on a 19^th Century Broadwood piano, manufactured in England, with only 85 keys (ending in the highest A), with a sound more authentic to the 19^th Century. The sonority is thick by modern standards, and it is hard to play the piano softly.

The program opened with four of the Novelletten from Op. 21 (1, 4, 5, 6) by Robert Schumann. The pieces are varied and a bit episodic, and it was sometimes difficult to tell where one piece ended.

The program continued with the Fantasy in F Minor, Op. 49, by Frederic Chopin. The piece starts with a funeral theme that does not return; like the B-flat Minor Scherzo, it ends in the relative major, which is not totally convincing. (But Mahler did that with the first movement of his Third Symphony, and the tonality progression works perfectly).

The highlight of the program was the Hammerklavier Sonata, #29, Op. 106, in B-flat, by Ludwig van Beethoven. The last movement fugue has been called “Bach on steroids” . The F# minor Adagio, as played, creates a leaden effect in a few places that I now realize I was trying to recreate in my own Third Sonata, which I wrote at age 18 as my father recovered from a “mild heart attack” related the emotional upheaval of my 1961 William and Mary expulsion (discussed elsewhere in my blogs). I remember composing that passage sitting in the living room near a backyard picture window in the late winter of 1962, as then I could no longer play records at normal volume in the basement because they disturbed father as he rested in the bedroom above. But I probably didn’t have a recording of the work until I was working.

There is something else I noticed during the sonata: the tension and harmonic variety comes from the counterpoint and motives, not from deliberate using of varied chords. Otherwise, the harmonic scheme on its own could have sounded perfunctory. I also remember when taking piano that at first I didn't accept the idea that "many melodies" or simultaneous melodies could "make sense", the way it enriches an adult's musical ear.

Mr. Nasseri played an encore, a transcription of a familiar Bach aria, "Jesu, Joy of man's desiring".

We had a discussion with the artist after the concert (most of the audience remained), and he said that the “talent” (almost in the Biblical sense of the Parable of the Talents) of a performer and of a composer can be very different gifts. He described the way he memorizes music as he prepares it, and he says it took almost a year to learn the Hammerklavier. (Back in the 1960s, I had a friend who said no one should play Beethoven until he was 30!)

Here is Mr. Nasseri's website link.

Here’s a quirky video by “Hardest Piano Pieces” of a “takedown” of the Hammerkavier fugue, whatever that means.

I’ve mentioned before that the first Piano Concerto by a teenage Eugen d’Albert has an incredible fugal (almost atonal) cadenza just before the climax of the whole piece, that somewhat recalls the mood of the HammerKlavier fugue.

Note: The Mansion at Strathmore has a small art museum, with a display about the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery in the "Arab Sector" of Israel.

Episcopal High School sponsors chamber music concert of unusual Schubert, Brahms; did Schubert write a concerto?; a note on musicians' hearing

2011-10-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Last night (Oct. 4), the Episcopal High School in Alexandria VA presented the National Chamber Players in a free concert preceded by a reception. Here is the basic link for the event.

The high school is a large (private, parochial) boarding school at Braddock Road and Quaker Lane in Alexandria, with a huge campus; some professors actually live on campus. (I noticed an HRC blue-yellow equality sticker on the sill of a doorway to a nearby dorm, very visible from the sidewalk.) The Reception was in an area with a small museum and a convincing exhibition of the arts education at the school.

There were two works. The first was the Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano, D. 821, “transcribed” for cello and piano, played by James Lee, cellist, and Robert De Silva. The arpeggione was a hybrid of cello and guitar, used in the early 19^th Century. The three-movement work sounded very low key, compared to the grandeur of some of Schubert’s later chamber works. I had trouble telling where the “slow movement” ended and the finale (Allegretto) started – the finale sounded like it was taking off as a variation of the slow movement. The final chords died away, which sometimes happens in conducting Schubert’s symphonies (even the C Major), but I do not like the effect. (Yes, it naturally happens if you hit a fortissimo chord on the piano and hold it.)

The Sonata is sometimes transcribed as a “concerto”, even though it is said that Schubert wrote no concerti. But even that isn’t quite true. There is a violin Concertino, D. 345, 11 minutes, and a 2001 New York Times letter in 2001 mentions it (played by the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston). There is a YouTube link by “gfisg”, link here (two parts). A Teldec CD is shown, which I couldn’t find on Amazon now.

The second part of the program (no intermission) was the Piano Quartet #3 in C Minor, Op. 60, by Johannes Brahms (not to be confused with a similar-sounding C Minor string quartet which I do have on Teldec). Brahms supposedly composed this when infatuated with Clara Schumann, about the time of Robert’s tragic demise in a mental institution. The work is dark and dense. The first movement is epic, the second is a brief scherzo with temporary triumph, the andante has a famous melody, and the finale is marked “Allegro commodo” (comfortable), and unusual marking (I used it in my own second sonata in the first movement), but becomes triumphant, holding the listener in his seat for the “ending”. I’ll give the spoiler. The work starts to die away, before two final C Major fortissimo chords (the supposed "Picardy Third", as explained in Wikipedia here as "tierce de picardie"; the string quartet does not use this device at the end.) Brahms apparently wrote this work shortly before tackling his triumphant Symphony #1 in C Minor, with the famous finale.

Benny Kim and Abigail Evans joined as violins.

Also:

Here is an important sidebar from p E3 of the Washington Post Tuesday Oct. 4, by Linda Searing, a column called “Quick Study”. Link. I’ve reported before my concerns about possible hearing loss of musicians whone perform and are exposed to nearby instruments, but a recent study suggested that musicians have a superior ability to understand speech in a noisy background environment. See earlier posting Sept. 17, 2008.

Nico Muhly's "A Good Understanding" (and four other compositions)

2011-10-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I wrote (on my main “BillBoushka” blog) a posting about recent comments by composer Nico Muhly and others that composers cannot get recordings from performing groups of initial recordings of their own works.

I needed to sample his music, so I ordered his 2010 Decca (i.e. London) CD of “A Good Understanding’, which sounds like one of those “moral philosophy” composition names, number “B0014741-2”.

Actually, “A Good Understanding” (with marquee print in reverse on the CD jacket) is the fourth of five compositions on the disk, all with mostly female and child voices and limited instrumentation, especially organ and brass. The first is “Bright Mass with Canons” (4 movements), followed by “First Service” (“Magnificat & Nunc dimittis”, 2 movements), “Senex puerum portabat”, then “A Good Understanding”, and then the 3-song “Expecting the Main Things from You”. Members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale are conducted by Grant Gershon. Kimo Smith plays the organ; there are parts for trumpets, horn, trombones, horn, violins and viola, and soprano and mezzo-soprano, with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus in “Understanding.”

Generally, the music is quiet and modal and somewhat archetypal to my ear. But the two shorter one-movement pieces (“Senex” and “Understanding”) seemed to exhibit the post harmonic (sometimes polytonal) tension. In the first movement of the last song cycle, there is a repeating figure that sounds like an amalgam of Arnold Schoenberg and Philip Glass, if one can imagine that. Of the five compositions, only “Understanding” ended loudly.

It’s interesting that Muhly uses the word “Understanding” as a piece title. The liner notes discuss a religious, sacramental context for the piece (and all others but the last, based on Whitman). But I can’t help but wonder if there is a hidden reference to Dan Fry’s group in Arizona called “Understanding” back in the 1970s, and the process called “The Area of Mutual Agreement”. But my experiences with that New Age group occurred just before Muhly’s advent; born in 1981, he would be about 30 now. That’s old enough, according to one past friend of mine in that lost semester at William and Mary back in 1961, to start playing Beethoven.

Here’s the Amazon link. Recently, I’ve been noticing that Amazon is using Lasership instead of UPS to ship.

Here's a link to an August posting by Muhly, "World to Come".

Here's Nico speaking on "Contact!" on YouTub:

NBC airs report on making Broadway's "Lion King" suitable for autistic students

2011-10-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Tonight, NBC Nightly News, in its “Making a Difference” series, ran a report on autism-friendly performances of the Broadway adoption of the (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff) Disney film “The Lion King” (lyrics Tim Rice, music, Hans Zimmer). A 3-D version of this stage musical is re-adapted for film and is to be released soon in theaters by Disney.

The NBC report covered the way a legitimate stage performance is modified for an audience sensitive to sudden changes in stimulation, including sudden loud noises (which I have always disliked) and lights.

In the stage versions, actors wear giant animal costumes, and hollow puppets are also used.

I saw the original Disney film in 1992 and was quite moved by it. I remember the songs about being oneself.

I'm reminded of another stage-movie comparison. Universal sells a DVD of the 25th Anniversary "Les Miserables", but Universal is also producing a "real movie" of it directed byTom Hooper.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For another "Russian" postromantic, try Taneyev; also some notes on Brahms and Schumann; what is "philistinism"?

2011-10-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

With all the popularity of Rachmaninoff as a “Russian” postromantic composer (homage to Tchaikovsky), I thought I would mention the monumental Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 30, by Sergei Taneyev. The other day I played the Arabesque recording with Jerome Lowenthal, piano, and with Paul Rosenthal, Yukiko Kamel, Marcus Thompson, and Stephen Kates playing the two violins, viola and cello respectively, dating all the way back to 1985.

The work runs to about 41 minutes, with the first movement almost half the work, starting with a slow introduction and a rich post-Czarist Sonata movement crashing to a violent close, reminding one of the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Manfred (quote on “Smallville” as I recall). The scherzo is in E-flat, and the slow movement is in the subdominant C Major. That’s unusual in minor-keyed cyclic works, but I did that with my D Minor Piano Sonata (age 16), and the trouble is that the dominant of the slow movement becomes the tonic of the whole work, maybe tiring the ear. But here the finale shows signs of progressive tonality (like that to be followed with Carl Nielsen later), starting out in C Minor as if a conventional rondo. But it wanders back, as G becomes “Dominant” (pun), and the work overreaches itself with its triumphant “marcatissimo” end in G, which generally hasn’t been a popular key for triumphant closes with romantics (Elgar’s Enigma being the exception). The triumphant closing theme has a rising line that resembles the American "Star Spangeled Banner", with a Rachmaninoff-like "big tune" feel; I wondered, what 40's film noir was this "obscure" music used for? ("I did it for the money, and I did it for the woman.") This whole work sounds like it wanted to be, not a piano concerto, but a full-fledged “symphony”. As Dohanyi showed, thought, the piano quintet can really get loud.

Here’s a recording on YouTube of the finale posted by Gllandyen, peformed by the Artsblooming Ensemble in 2008. The group has a Facebook page in Chinese (link) which I’m not sure how that works if Facebook isn’t allowed in China (maybe Taiwan, or maybe the ban is easy to get around).

This morning I played through a Teldec CD of the two famous F#-minor Sonatas, by Schumann and Brahms (Elizabeth Leonskaja) somewhat low-keyed performances, and then on Simax, Eva Knardahl playing the Brahms Sonata #1 in C, Op. 1. Yes, you heard me right. They call this the Brahms “Hammerkavier” (but there is no “grosse fugue”). It’s filled with familiar themes, for such a rarely played work. One time a pianist said, “I will play Brahms. You may not like it, but it will be good for you.” The Brahms F#-minor sonata is weird, too.

As for the Schumann, it anticipates the world of the Big C Major Fantasy, but the transition between Scherzo and Finale seems abrupt. I love the frantic passage work in the first movement. It is said to be connected to Schumann’s opposition to ”philistinism”, which is well explained in Wikipedia.

More British music at Arlington VA church accompanies biting "political" sermon today scolding partisan Congress

2011-09-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

Today, I wrote a posting on the issues blog about the substance of a sermon by Dr. James Atwood at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington. The music today was also interesting.

The organ postlude, played by Carol Feather Martin, was an adaptation – Variations and Fugue on the Welsh folksong “Llanglofan” by Aaron David Miller. The sound was a little reminiscent of the organ lessons that emulate Bach – pieces actually by Krebs – here baroque, with a taste of polytonality and pastoralism, yet countrapuntal.

The anthem, from the youth choir, was a gentler fare than the choice on 9/11: here, it was “May the Mind of Christ” – music by Cyril Barham-Gould (1925, England), text by Kate Wilkinson (link) , adaptation by David Giardiniere. There is a performance online [website url] here).

Is there a hidden message -- we need "parliamentary" government?

This somewhat popular British piece could have wound up in the Royal Wedding – or was it there and did we overlook it? Look in your hymnal, at all the references to Sir Hubert Parry (“I Was Glad”; “Oh Jerusalem”).

Here's an odd story: Pastor Tim Lucas at the Liquid Church in New Jersey reversed the collection, handing out money to churchgoers, hoping they will practice personal charity with it (rather than depend on others or "the church").

Foggy Bottom Morris Men dance in Ballston (Arlington VA)

2011-09-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

Today (Saturday Sept. 24) I chanced a view on Wilson Boulevard in the Ballston Section of Arlington VA of the “Foggy Bottom Morris Men”, who perform “stick and hankie” dances from “Cotswolds” villages in England like Bampton and Bledington. The dances resemble what you would see at a Renaissance Fair.

I did not have my camera with me to make a video or photo, but here is the website.

They have several YouTube videos, such as this one of the Ampleforth Sword Dance.

I used to attend the Renaissance festivals in the late summer south of Minneapolis only highway 169. There were plenty of shows like this, as well as (always) a simultaneous chess exhibition from a local International Master. I remember one particular loss, to the “English Opening”.

My own basement turns up remnants of a "lost" piano pre-career

2011-09-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

So, look what I found last night rummaging through paper records in my basement, which barely escaped the floods of Robert E. Lee (at least in Virginia).

Here’s a courtly (heterosexist and perfunctory) Minuet in E Major, dated about 1957, which actually won a composition contest. I don’t think it “deserves it” as much as some other more recent stuff.

Now, I also found some handwritten comments by the judges for my Piano Sonata in D Minor (1959). I was somewhat under the spell of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, and the writing, out of superficiality perhaps, lingers too much in the dominant key, as with the opening of the Finale. Later, I tried to pencil in some modulations.

One of the judge’s comments is rather moot, as to ennui with the thematic material.

The other’s is a little more positive. Note how the judges look for neatness in handwritten manuscripts in these pre-computer (pre-Sibelius) days.

I still remember another typewritten comment, missing now, suggesting that I look at the short pieces of Bartok, Bloch, and Kabalevsky. Why these? How about Robert Schumann?

The “cyclic” work of several movements where at least one movement had a full Sonata form interested me as a youngster. It seemed to take one on a journey. It’s odd that a formal Symphony (or Concerto), with no connection of themes between the “movements” conveys as sense of an adventure (although connecting the themes of different movements became more common during the 19^th Century, perhaps starting with Cesar Franck, or before – Brahms did it with his Op 5 Piano Sonata, and Beethoven actually did it opening the finale of the 9^th Symphony).

I do hear a lot these days, though, about the virtues of “miniature” pieces. Actually some of that became popular with expressionism and atonality: Schoenberg, Berg and Webern all wrote suites of “pieces”. But Alban Berg’s early “Three Pieces for Orchestra” is practically a short post-Mahler symphony.

9-11 Concert at Kennedy Center features movement from Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms"

2011-09-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

On the evening of Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011, the Washington National Cathedral presented “A Concert for Hope” (“A Call for Compassion”) at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, hosted by Anderson Cooper. The venue was moved because of the earthquake damage situation at the Cathedral.

President Obama spoke.

The musical highlight of the evening (just one hour, on ABC) was the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (Psalm 23), solo part by a young person from Washington National Cathedral. The musical style has always sounded to me like an outgrowth of the music in the Kaddish Symphony, with the Psalm 23 movement somewhat resembling the slow “song” section of the Kaddish. (The longer finale of Chichester is Psalm 131.)

Included also was the string orchestra version of the famous Adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet (second movement, Op. 11).

There was also a rendition of “Amazing Grace”. Also included were Alan Jackson and “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” and Patti LaBelle with “Two Steps Away”.

Here is a link describing the artists in the concert.

Here is another blogger post giving the text of the President’s speech, link.

I have a recording of Chichester Psalms with James Litton performing with the American Boychoir and American Symphony Orchestra, dated 1990, on the MusicMasters label. The CD notes say this is the first recording of Bernstein's "original version." The CD also has a setting of a piece by Charles Davidson with a curious title, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”, orchestrated by Donald Fraser. There is a lot of a cappella and spoken text, and a musical style like that of John Rutter. The text deals with conditions in the ghettos during the Holocaust. (As for the title: Tiny Tim’s “OGAB” maybe.)

Arlington VA Church presents new work in memory of 9/11; some notes on the effect of twelve-tone music

2011-09-11T10:23:00.001-07:00

On Sunday, September 11, 2011, the Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington VA held a contemporary service at 10:30 in the gym, and after the sermon performed a handbell composition, about five minutes, “Prayer for Peace” by Michael Helman.

The composition opens with four twelve-tone chords, which on the score look overwhelming. (Handbell scores apparent print their notes without vertical lines.) Helman writes “The four opening chords of the piece represent the four planes that crashed that day. The chords include all twelve tones of the chromatic scale to symbolize the effect that terrorism has on everyone”. He also says the introduction, played today, is optional. The rest of the piece is a moderately tempoed medley, very tonal.

Back in the 1950s, music critics wrote about twelve-tone music as expressionistic and somewhat designed to convey emotions that are “morbid and terrifying”. But sometimes twelve-tone music naturally grows out of Romantic chromaticism, originating with Liszt and Wagner, but very apparent in some music by Schoenberg but especially Alban Berg (as in the opera “Lulu”, which sounds like romantic opera now).

In my own 1962 Piano Sonata, which I have discussed plans to transcribe into modern software, I experimented with taking the C Major theme of the opening and converting it to a twelve –tone row in the Development section. The effect is that of hyperchromaticism, while fugal, and still sounds a bit postromantic

Two pages reproduced here.

Later, in the Scherzo middle section, I have a cadenza that sounds almost random in the choice of notes for trills and figures (like in the “diplomacy” music I reviewed on Aug. 24.

In the slow movement, I open with a twelve-tone row “harmonized” in E-flat minor, but then go to F# minor, Bb-minor, and B Major with some very tonal, however meandering, music.

A NIH in 1962, the psychiatrists had written about me, “He had been an adequate piano player since childhood and developed considerable interest in music. He learned some composition and began to compose a series of piano sonatas based on a 12 tone scale. These were compositions that he did not hear in his head but rather were worked out on a prearranged formula.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of a music future, but also quite inaccurate on what I had composed. I’ve described the NIH experience in some detail on the “BillBoushka” blog.

Rev. Judith Fulp-Eickstaedt preached a sermon “Living Life, Living Faith”, references Genesis 50:15-21 and Matthew 18:21-35. The sermon was on forgiveness, which is the basis of Grace. It’s hard to separate individual forgiveness issues with the collective grief of 9/11 and the need for “justice”. It seems that Grace and forgiveness are the only “intellectual bridge” between the need for a society to sustain itself “collectively”, requiring flexibility and sacrifice from its citizens, and still aim toward individual rights and abstract “equality” for everyone. Without forgiveness in many cases that abrogate personal responsibility, Grace is not possible. But its hard to separate the issues with, say, upsidedown mortgage debt and the forceful expropriation attempted by flash mobs – or the nihilism of terrorists.

PBS airs Met's 2009 "Madame Butterfly"; will be reperformed this season

2011-09-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight some PBS stations aired the Anthony Minghella production of Giacomo Puccin’s “Madame Butterfly” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2009. The best link is here. The production will be repeated in December 2011

The Met version is the three act version, directly by Gary Halvorsk. Patricia Racette sings the lead role.

The plot (story by John Luther Long) may seem disturbing if put in a modern context. A US Naval officer has engaged to marry a very young Japanese bride (it wouldn’t be legal today) but to divorce her when he finds an American wife. The story hardly encourages “family values”, or even stable marriages between equal adults, capable of raising children to adulthood.

The production used a mannequin for the child, which looked a bit odd, especially in the tragic last scene where the princess puts a knife at her own throat.

The music, like most Puccini, mixes post Strauss-Mahler schmaltz with some whole-tone effects more common in French music. There is one major soaring theme that revolves around a few notes.

At the tragic end, the music seems ready to crash on B-minor octaves (almost like Tchaikovsky in "Black Swan") when instead it leaves us dangling on a non-tonic chord. I went to the Casio piano and played one loud B octave to conclude. (Remember the note B in Wozzeck?)

Sorry, the story doesn't invoke "OGAB", a favorite saying of my Army buddies back in 1969 at Ft. Eustis (that is, "Oh, go way Butterfly!", from Tiny Tim).

Progress report on Logic, future music scoring plans; here's the score of one "Polytonal Prelude"; More on Schumann with his Triple-time marches

2011-09-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

Well, today, I photocopied the four pages of an original polytonal prelude (D Major, E Major, sometimes F#), dated back to about 1973. (It looks like page 2 really starts over in the middle.)

In early August, I took a “lesson” in Apple Logic Express at an Apple store in Arlington. Most of my files would not play except with the USB to the Casio piano. We took one file and converted it to play directly. The techs ("geniuses") were Googling around to solve the “problem”. We wound up creating a new track and converting the IO to “ESS24” if I can follow the notes.

The upshot of this is that I will need to do two things: first, to score my Sonatas and other pieces, I’ll need a more score-specific product like Sibelius or Finale, which are expensive. The other thing is that I’ll have to wade through the Logic booklet and do everything even though much of the mixing and editing doesn’t apply to what I want to do (it would be used more by rock bands). I expect to have this done by the first of October and be reading to purchase and use a product like Sibelius for my own compositions.

With some of my music, there is the possibility of “orchestration”, probably for classical chamber orchestra sounds.

As with any product, it seems as though you need to learn to do everything in order to do what you want, exactly.

Here are the other pages of the Prelude: 2

Page 3

Page 4

Here’s a YouTube of a few seconds of the 1956 Sonatina in Moog. (File 2011 is correct; File 2007, on YouTube, didn’t record any sound.)

Here’s a crude rendition of the complete Minuet from the A Major Sonatina, dated 1957 (hey, that’s the year of “Atlas Shrugged”!)

Today, I played the Angel EMI CD (1989) of Youri Egorov playing Schumann. The Carnaval, Op. 9, ends with that odd March in ¾ time, an oxymoron (the Davidsblunder against the Philistines). The Toccata in C, Op, 7, opens with a familiar pattern, and comes to a curious quiet close. The Arabesque is familiar, and Bunte Blatter (“Many Colored Leaves”, Op. 99), carry Schumann’s concept of miniaturization as far as possible, within larger movements.

Ted Hearne's new piano suite "Parlor Diplomacy" (and its political corollary, "Timocracy")

2011-08-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

This morning, I listened online to a new 20-minute contemporary piano suite called “Parlor Diplomacy” by Ted Hearne, performed (and written for) Timo Andres. You can listen to the entire piano work on Ted’s site, here . As I noted on a post-script on my Dec. 11, 2010 posting here, the work seems to have a satirical political meaning. “Parlor diplomacy” is one thing, maybe how things get done (remember Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Camp David talks with Menachem Begin). But Timo’s recent posting (link) enriched the meaning. “Parlour Timocracy” might mean “local autocracy” over one’s life (following one’s own goals in an Ayn Rand-like manner rather than paying too much attention to the opinions of others), or it might mean a tight, if benevolent political system where things “really” get done. Facebook is something like that (a timocracy, or perhaps a zuckocracy) already, leading to results like Arab Spring. The coined word is funny, given all the criticism of gridlock and partisan bickering in our own government in the US, and calls that the US needs a parliamentary system like Britain’s.

"Technically", the music emphasizes leggiero, with a lot of passage work in higher registers and bizarre, shifting meters. The second movement (the slow movement) actually recalls Brahms toward the very end, however.

Is this music for libertarians? Music for conservatives? Let the Washington Times review it. And let Fareed Zakaria analyze the “word”. And maybe "Barack" will play it on his laptop while on his Martha's Vineyard "vacances".

Here's a YouTube clip from Ted Hearne's "Katrina Ballads", winner of the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize.

Who is the "English Mahler"? Havergal Brian, or (just) Benjamin Britten

2011-08-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Is Havergal Brian (1876-1972) the “English Mahler”?

Well, maybe sometimes, but actually Benjamin Britten, much more familiar to most music lovers, sometimes fits the idea more closely, especially with the ascetic sounds (like the “open chamber” style of Mahler’s late symphonies) in some operas – “Billy Budd” (Feb 27, 2008 here) and “Death in Venice”, and in the Cello Symphony (with that scherzo). Other times, though, as with the Spring, he’s much farther away. But the “War Requiem” is probably a lot like the Requiem Mahler had planned to compose had he lived longer.

Brian’s reputation may come from the massive Gothic Symphony (on Marco Polo), with three instrumental movements followed by a choral service. The first movement is short and violent, driving its point home. The ending dies in hushed peace after a cataclysm about three minutes before.

But I pulled out the Symphony #3, in C-sharp minor (1932) (always a self-indulgent key), a 1990 recording on Hyperion by Lionel Friend conducting the BBC Symphony, the other day. About 62 minutes, it’s the longest Brian symphony after the First (many of his thirty or so remaining symphonies are relatively short). But it also predicts the course of a similar work by Leonard Bernstein, the Age of Anxiety “Symphony” (April 3 here).

Like the Bernstein, the first movement has a piano obbligato and a somewhat episodic form, with block-like variations put together as to approximate a sonata form. It comes to a violent climax.

The second movement, a long slow movement (Lento) however, here varies a bit from expressionism and wanders into the pastoral world of Vaughn Williams, with a curious effect (OK, maybe the world of the VW 4^th).

The last two movements will sound familiar—the listener asks himself “in what movie did I hear this music in the background?” The scherzo is a Mahler-fest, with a Landler-like trio and crunching rhythms and plenty of Viennese schmaltz. The piece really is suspiciously familiar. (Bernstein, by comparison, provided a scherzo based on rapid jazz rhythms). The Finale returns to the somber march rhythm of the first movement (just as Bernstein would provide a majestic finale for “Anxiety”), particularly focusing on a figure like the famous Beethoven 5^th motto. The music undergoes chromatic adventures, and builds up to a conclusion (in parallel D-flat Major) of crushing power, a little bit like Prokofiev (as in the 6^th) without the humor. It is, in the final measures, purely British, with all the upper lip. (Actually, there is another rhythmic figure that appears in the next-to-last movement of the "completed" Mahler 10th.)

Since Prince Charles and William are both said to be affaciandos of concert music, and William probably knows about this work. I wonder how it would have come across at the wedding. That finale would have provided quite a postlude, perhaps burying the listener in submission.

Arlington County VA Fair has major Civil War reenactment in mobile van

2011-08-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

The County Fair in Arlington VA this weekend (the 35th Annual) featured the “Civil War 150 Historymobile” (link), with an exhibit inside that resembled a miniature “Revolutionary City”. There was a simulation of an 1862 battle scene, with a letter written by a Confederate soldier from Mississippi as he bled to death from a mangled shoulder. There were exhibits with audio stories of slaves who had to decide whether to escape and join the Union Army and believe stories that they would be shackled. (Revolutionary City in Williamsburg dramatizes similar quandaries for slaves during Colonial times.) The last showed the home front, where Virginians had to do without, and learn to “make apple pie without apples.”

Inside, in the fair space set up at Thomas Jefferson Middle School (where I have subbed in the past), there were various contest exhibits, and various organizations, including Washington-Lee High School Alumni (I am a 1961 graduate), and the Potomac Harmony Chorus, an all female a cappella group (link).

Contest pictures: Baking:

Garden:

Eat your vegetables!:

Chevy Volt car

And engine battery:

"Adopt Me" opportunity for pooches:

Washington-Lee Alumni:

And a painting of the school as it looked when I attended from 1958-1961. Homeroom was in room 307.

The website for the fair is this. In Chrome, the PC froze for a second as the website loaded the embedded pictures, then was OK. (In web programming, that's called "unsafe code" where a script doesn't release memory properly while it runs; it doesn't hurt anything but make the site slow.) That's not the best way for a sophisticated website to behave.

From Indianapolis:

There is Breaking News on CNN: a stage collapsed at a Sugarland concert at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis this evening (link).

A national birthplace and a mini harpsichord demo

2011-08-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

Today I visited the George Washington Birthplace National Monument on the Potomac River a few miles east of Colonial Beach, VA, and was “treated” to a view of a harpsichord. A teenage girl tried to play some ragtime music on the harpsichord, which indeed led to an odd effect.

The harpsichord appears to have 58 keys, if I count right. I don’t understand how there could be only two black keys left of C note (in the picture). I guess I should have asked the park ranger permission to play it myself. It seems that in the 18^th Century the keyboard size could vary. The harpsichord was actually a flexible and advanced instrument, whose expressive potential seems almost alien to those of us raised on romantic piano music (back to Beethoven).

One of the first harpsichord recordings that I owned during my college years was a DGG (in the days when it was premium record label) of Bach’s first two harpsichord concerti, in D Minor and E Major respectively. The Wikipedia analysis of the first movement of the first concerto is quite interesting (in the “rotating key signatures”) when compare to the modern sonata form, even if one looks at the first movement as a monothematic sonata form. Here’s the link.

Netflix offers Farm Aid 20th Anniversary; 2011 concert in Kansas City soon

2011-08-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

Netflix offers a DVD of the 2005 “Farm Aid” 20th Anniversary Concert held in the Tweeter Center in Tinley Park, IL (link). It features Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, as well as Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Kenny Chesny, Wilco, Emmylou Harris, Los Lonely Boys, Widespread Panic, Budy Guy, and John Meyer. It runs 164 minutes.

The music is a mixture or rock, soul, and country-western and tends to seem repetitive.

But there is an interesting comment at the beginning. Farmers can’t be replaced by machines or corporations (although they get taken over by agribusinesses); they grow real food for “healthy young people.”

Farm Aid’s concert in 2011 takes place Aug. 13 in Kansas City, KS, at the Livestrong Sporting Park, with information here.

More on Chopin, in the "summer"

2011-07-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, July 17, there was a performance of the Berceuse in D-flat Major (Op. 57) by Frederic Chopin, played by graduated high school senior and entering college student Claire Bobst, at a summer service at the Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington VA.

Chopin is probably known as the pianist-composer who discovered that it’s easier to plat music on black keys (many sharps or many flats) than on the ivory.

A Berceuse is a lullaby. This work, like the Barcarolle, tends to sound a bit repetitious (it runs over a triplet-based ground bass) and, to my ear, even trite, compared to Chopin’s “big” piano works – the sonatas, ballades, and “scherzos”. Chopin was actually very effective with large sonata forms. The etudes work for me, too. But – a lullaby is supposed to lull one to sleep, maybe. It’s "summer in the city".

In high school, I did have a Columbia recording of Istomin playing the Nocturnes, and the best of those to my ear was the unusually-formatted G Minor. I remember listening to them during chess games “in the basement.”

Jeffrey Lee plays the work on YouTube here

Something else I noticed about summer services: In summer, people come to the “contemporary” services in gymnasiums and fill them up. This one was low key, in a sanctuary, so not so well attended. Next week will probably be a different matter.

Picture: "Summer" on Mt. Washington, NH (60 degrees F, actually, July 11).

Josh Groban dazzles Capitol Fourth with "The War at Home"

2011-07-05T05:22:00.000-07:00

I attended the Capitol Fourth on the West Lawn Monday night, Independence Day.

Jimmy Smits hosted the concert. I sat on the south side. This year, a reserved paid section had the best seats in the center front.

The National Anthem was harmonized in an unusual and creative way. I’ve always thought that the “Star Spangled Banner” is a little dull and can use some polytonality.

The highlight of the evening for me was the three songs by sung (and played at piano) by Josh Groban, with his own original “The War at Home” particularly passionate and “postromantic”, as well as two other numbers.

Josh Groban Corner Pubs offers this YouTube video:

Matthew Morrison (Glee) sung an “aria” from the “The Light in the Piazza” (a big movie soon?)

Just before the fireworks show, the Million Dollar Quartet from the famous 1956 jam session in Memphis performed.

Steve Martin (“The Spanish Prisoner”) headed up a country and western sing along worthy of the old Magnolia’s TP (that’s not toilet paper) in Dallas (now called the Round-Up).

As usual, the concert ends with the closing pages of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, sung here with Russian Cossacks. It’s always sounded a little anti-patriotic to me.

The best PBS link is here.

Afterwards, I picked up the end of the New York City Macy’s concert (on the East River) at Remington’s on PA Ave. Here is the basic link Although the article says the barges were located around 42^nd St, at appeared that the cauliflower or jellyfish-shaped fireworks lined up all the way down to Battery Park and out to the Statue of Liberty (in NJ). Did people watch this from “Bargemusic” (off the Brookly Heights Promenade, under the Brooklyn Bridge)? It ended with “God Bless America”, without Kate Smith.

By around 11th grade, I had collected many of the standard classics on LP

2011-06-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

I still have hundreds of LP records, including mono, in boxes in storage, dating back to the 1950s, and even a few old 78’s. It’s true, home “entertainment” is becoming more centralized, but some day I’ll have to pick up a new amp, new speakers, and most of all find a turntable and tone arm again. I’d like to get to play them again.

CD’s take less space, but the new trend is just to sell MP3 downloads along with accompanying PDF’s, and let the user save them in the cloud. The MP3 file "object instance" is still legally like a phonograph record object.

I remember having some 10-inch LP’s back in the early 50s, like Strauss waltzes. But mostly I started getting LP classical records, sometimes as presents, around ninth grade. By 11^th grade I had some of the big classic: On RCA Victor, Rubenstein playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Liszt’s First, and another RCA with Rubenstein and the Grieg and Rachmaninoff Paganini. That’s where I learned the thrill (“chills and fever” or adrenaline rush) of a “big tune” ending, that surprisingly a lot of composers today view as self-indulgent.

I also had a Krips Brahms First, a Mercury Dorati Beethoven Seventh, a cheap Beethoven 5^th and Schubert Unfinished on one record, a Dvorak New World, and then a Chopin Piano Concerto #1. In my senior year of high school, I discovered Sibelius, and picked up Symphony 1 (Beecham), 2 (Munch), and 5 (Ormandy). A friend in the Science Honor Society who also collected records (this was 1961) admired Dvorak, had a lot Artia recordings. He also loved to indulge the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, which to me sounds self-indulgent.

Then I would hear about the evils of sapphire needles and heavy tracking. In 1962, I would get a VM stereo, and find that all the records with piano had been ruined toward the inner grooves. The smaller stereo stylus would even pick up the vinyl shavings from worn records; on mono, a 1-mil stylus actually worked a little better.

Collecting records during high school and early college was actually important to developing a musical "ear". I have always been able to recognize most classical compositions that give any sense of normal bearing after after a few hearings. What's playing in my head right now? The surprise ending of the Prokofiev Sixth (another Op 111). (I'll get to thinking about the Liszt B-minor later.)

Owing a "copy" (or "instance" in software engineering jargon) of someone else's work and learning it mentally is still not the same as being able to perform it, and it's still not the same as creating a work yourself. But that logically follows.

Major Washington DC church shows plans for new organ

2011-06-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

Today, in the Sunday morning service at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC, pastor Haggray interviewed organist-choirmaster Dr. Lawrence P. Schreiber about the plans for a new organ, to be manufactured in Hartford CT and installed in the early fall of 2012.

The organ pipes will cover more of the upper areas of the chancel and sanctuary and support choral and congregational singing much more.

A slide presentation showed what the organ will look like.

Schreiber said “Mozart once called the organ the king of instruments.”

Kagel's composition for 111 cyclists

2011-06-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

There is a composition by Mauricio Kagel, “Eine Brise” (“A Little Breeze”) to be performed by 111 bicycles with bells. It gets put on in a number of cities. Composer Timo Andres has an account of its being put on in Greenwich Village in NYC on June 21, Summer Solstice Day, (website url) here. -- he gives a three minute embedded Twitter video short film. I guess there’s no connection to Beethoven or Prokofiev’s Op. 111, or at least I don’t hear it. Maybe there’s a connection to Prokofiev’s ironic finale.

It doesn’t look like a race, just slow motion, sort of Andante Commodo.

I've tweeted about bad amateur biker behavior, like going against traffic when not in a bike lane and going through red lights at the same time, when a driver who cannot see the biker needs to make a right turn with a green light.

New Jersey teacher keeps middle school ensemble together at his own expense after teacher layoffs (MSNBC)

2011-06-22T05:48:00.000-07:00

NBC Nightly New “Making a Difference” covered the story of middle school music and violin teacher Nathan Thomas, who was laid off from his Paterson, NJ teaching job due to severe budget cuts. While unpaid and commuting at his own expense (and even after buying the school musical instruments personally), he continued teaching some of the students free at a nearby church on Saturday mornings, and the string ensemble, about ten players, prepared for its Spring Concert

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In many public school systems, arts and music programs are among the first go get cut in the wake of severe debt-driven reductions following the 2008 collapse.

Try Richard Strauss's early F Minor Symphony

2011-06-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

If you want to look for a suitably obscure Romantic crowd pleaser (maybe to use in a movie score), look at the Symphony in F Minor, Op. 12, composed at age 19 by Richard Strauss.

The familiar iconoclastic harmonies of the “mature” (that is, mid 20’s) Strauss is not there. But there is a pre-post-Romantic symphony, with real moments, and yet a rather striking Mendelssohn-like sound in its climactic passages.

In the mid 1980s, the progressive company Records International made a CD with Michael Halasz conducting the Slovak Philharmonic, in one continuous track, as if a tone poem.

In fact, the lugubrious descending theme opening the work anticipates the “Alpine Symphony”. The Andante Cantabile (the third “movement”, in C) is truly moving. The finale transforms the descending theme into a new hymn tune with lots of repeated notes (like Schubert), but when the climax of the work blossoms into a familiar sounding Lutheran-like hymn, the Mendelssohn feeling prevails, recalling the triumphant close of the Scotch. F Major, with its pastoral feel, seems almost like the wrong key. Maybe the whole symphony could have been written in F# minor, so that the concluding triumph would play in the richer F# Major. Just raising pitch doesn’t change that, each key has its own personality. Mozart knew that.

Timo Andres performs at Bargemusic, accompanied by thunder, lightning and fireworks behind. The show goes on!

2011-06-10T05:11:00.000-07:00

Very few concert pianists regularly give entire recitals of contemporary, little or completely unheard music, but Timothy Andres (or we should use his trademark name “Timo Andres”, b. 1985) does so regularly.

Add to that, you needed sea legs for last night’s concert at Bargemusic (website url link) near the Brooklyn Bridge at the Fulton Ferry Landing. I found myself dizzy for a moment, and then remembered I was on a boat (which fairly rocks when a freighter passes by up the East River). After looking outside at the water (and the Manhattan skyline) a couple minutes, I was fine. I had done this sort of thing in 2001 at a disco dance on Lake Superior in Duluth.

The thunderstorms started immediately, punctuating Tmo’s playing with lightning bolts hitting the skyscrapers behind him, and thunder. Then, after the “Intermission”, there occurred a fireworks show, perhaps by coincidence.

Timo started the concert with his own “At the River” (2011). Again, Timo often likes to compose in short miniatures, almost etude-style. There are plenty of effects with the whole tone scale and various fourths and ninths; the piece had the sound of Ravel perhaps, definitely Parisian, as does a lot of his music to my ear.

Next there was a five-movement suite “Parlor Diplomacy” (2011), world premiere, by Ted Hearne (b. 1982), with some Brahmsian effects in the slower movements. The last movement is called “ambiguation”, as if to recognize that body language signals from people can be ambiguous, as was the case for me in Minnesota the previous weekend.

He then played a piece called “Hoyt Schermerhorn” (2010) by Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984). The piece is named after a Brooklyn subway station. It ends with odd effects in the upper registers achieved by microphones placed near the Steinway.

After the Intermission, Timo played “Clifton Gates”, for piano and electronics, world premiere, 2011, by Jacob Cooper. The Gates refer to the physical objects, or perhaps gates to other universes as in Arthur C. Clarke novels. (Clifton is a street in Brooklyn, I think.) Cerrone set up the microphones and nearby MacBook and other electronic effects. Somewhere along here, I noticed tht Timo used an iPad for the sheet music.

There followed “Infinity Plunge” (2007), by Derek Johnson. This piece sounded like a one-movement Sonata, more or less in the style of Prokofiev, with a touch of Tubin (the “Northern Lights” sonata came to mind). It was the first piece on the program with some genuine postromanticism and more conventional piano virtuosity (lots of complicated arpeggios) supported by the thematic material. After building to a violent climax, Johnson, instead of ending, provides an Epilogue in the manner of Sir Arnold Bax, quiet, but and almost pastoral, before rising to a final fortissimo on one high note.

The last piece was “Authentic Presence” (2001), by Ingram Marshall, b. 1942 (the only composer represented over 30), who had been, in fact one of Timo’s piano teachers. The piece had a familiar melody (as if I had heard it before in a movie score), and a somewhat Brahmsian cast and coda. (Neither of my piano teachers, both female, had composed; but a chorus teacher in middle school had.)

As a concert pianist, Timo exhibits the idea that the performing professional musician should act and treat himself as as if a pro athlete. Like ballet and singing opera, concert piano work makes extreme physical demands. One should become a triatholon contestant and maintain such level of physical fitness: be able to run a marathon, win a Tour de France (hopefully without shaving and most of all without PED's), pitch a no-hitter and bat over .300. One must appear to be like one of Clark Kent's friends in "Smallville". I sometimes wonder if Timo Andres and "Timo" Lincecum (the "Freak" who pitches for the San Francisco Giants) could trade places. (As for no-hitters -- I expect that soon out of Nats' pitcher Jordan Zimmermann, but that's another blog posting. At least pianists don't regularly face Tommy John surgery -- yet). Timo seems to accomplish an unbelievable amount of work (composing, performing, producing albums, graphical and web design, etc), hardly conceivable without "powers" or being "one of them" while waiting for "The Event" -- like "Clark", or Jake 2.0, or Sean (from that series), or Chuck (from "Buy More"). Take heed -- tomorrow's superstar -- and your boss-- will be a nerd.

There were CD’s of Timo’s “Shy and Mighty” on sale, which I already have. By now, most of us have noticed that the piece “Flirtation Avenue” doesn’t belong in a wedding. It seems as though a lot of people in power these days don’t need more encouragement not to be faithful to spouses. Need I mention names of NY politicians, or speculate about the how at least one pol prepares for his photo pix? Others in the media will.

I got to chat with Johnson afterward, and learned that Sibelius and Finale are considered much easier software to use for entering my own music than Apple's Logic, which I have been learning to use.

I heard that the storms canceled an even tin Central Park last night, and that the NY Philharmonic is not giving its Concerts in the Park this summer.

(As to Timo's recent missive on biker bad behavior -- the City says, "don't ride on the sidewalk if you're over the age of 12". Yup, challenge those cars, go the wrong way. Cause drivers near misses! Make them feel guilty!)

Update: Nov. 21

Here's a story about "Sleeping Giants" and Beethoven Awareness Month on WQXR New York, by Nadia Sirota, "Timothy Andres: Bringing the virtuoso composer-performance tradition into the 21st Century", link here. Who else besides Timo can make entire recitals of new music and draw a big crowd and make it work, even in the middle of enormous storms and fireworks aoutside. Welcome to timocracy.

BBC/Time Warner offer DVD of Royal Wedding (but no pre-concert)

2011-06-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

If you didn’t go to London for the Royal Wedding “Event”, the next best thing is the BBC (and Time Warner) DVD of the occasion, 2 hours and six minutes, officially titled “The Royal Wedding: William & Catherine”, presented by Huw Edwards.

A good part of the DVD is photographed outside, before and after the Westminster Abbey ceremony, with a fly over by the RAF to end the DVD as William & Catherine wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

The narration mentions that the music of Sir Hubert Parry predominates, and his stirring coronation anthem “I Was Glad” starts 38 minutes into the DVD. The couple is officially married at about minute 49. Later Parry’s “O Jerusalem” is sung (quite majestic, it is commonly heard in most protestant denominations as a routine – if more complicated than usual – hymn). The narrators mention a motet (a capella) that the couple likes, specifically Motet ‘Ubi caritas’ by Paul Mealor, a Welsh composer, who is currently Reader in Composition at The University of Aberdeen. There is also a new anthem by John Rutter, “This Is the Day Which the Lord Has Made”, in tuneful, neoromantic style.

The sermons and homilies have the usual content, but fitting into today’s social and political debates about marriage, with the paradox it presents for western individualism. Every wedding is in a sense a royal wedding.

Toward the end there is a march by William Walton, and a Pomp and Circumstance March by Elgar.

The DVD, unfortunately, does not include the pre-service concert.

The service was discussed on the TV blog April 29, with an embed there of the Parry anthem, and a link to the official music program, including the concert.

Curiously, I saw only one piece by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford in the program. At the reception of my mother’s memorial service, I had the Fourth Irish Rhapsody played (Chandos). It is a slow, majestic piece that builds to a cataclysmic climax. Though long, it could have made a great postlude for the Wedding, with the incredible sendoff at the end.

My understanding is that both William and Prince Charles know classical music well. Perhaps they’ll find this post and discussions of their selections.

Visually, the Abbey looks striking in high definition, with garish colors: the greens of the plants, the reds, and a surprising use of blue, and a dense array of decoration everywhere.

The proceeds for the DVD are supposed to go to the Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry (link)

Here is the PBS YouTube embed of the heart of the wedding ceremony.

Pictures: My own parents had their own "royal wedding" in Washington DC on May 15, 1940.

Some more notes about Leonard Bernstein's post-Mahler symphonies

2011-05-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Recently (April 3), I wrote about Leonard Bernstein’s “symphonies”, specifically #2, and I wanted to round that out with some notes about #3, the “Kaddish”.

Back in my college days, I bought the original recording, dating back to 1964, in the Columbia KS series, of the work, issued in memory of JFK. That recording is on Sony CD now, but in 1978, Bernstein performed, with the Israeli Philharmonic, a slightly shorter (with less unaccompanied speech) revised version, about 40 minutes, which he prefers.

The work is about as close to another “Mahler” symphony, with Boys Choir and vocal soloist, that we have (excluding Hevergal Brian’s “Gothic”, which is in a more distant style anyway). The seven “movements” are grouped into three sections, with the Kaddish 2, and andante, concluding the second section, with soprano (Montserrat Caballe) definitely echoing the end of “Das Lied von der Erde” (with a pinch of Shostakovich).

Mahler, of course, never had a speaker (Schoenberg would, often enough, with his "sprechstimme"), but the text certainly extends Mahler’s soul searching. Here, the speaker (a woman in the 1963 recording, a man now) questions God’s “bargain” with him, and expects to rise to the level of a god himself. It sounds like “the tree of life”. The last words are “recreate each other.”

The music has this way of modulating within a melodic fragment and yet always sounding original in effect. In the end, the music becomes fast and loud, crashing to its end abruptly with accumulating fourths and octaves, recalling Prokofiev.

Not so, however, with the Concerto for Orchestra (1986-1989), on DG with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Jose Eduardo Chama. The second movement is a long theme and variations that gives the instrument groups a chance to play soloist; but the finale is a quiet meditation with baritone soloist. This may be the only “Concerto for Orchestra” with voice (however the Busoni piano concerto has a chorus). Bernstein could have called this a numbered symphony had he wanted to; the same probably holds for his Songfest.

The National Symphony in Washington will present the Kaddish June 2-4, link here.

The Washington Post has a critical prospective article by Stephen Brookes, May 27, "Samuel Pisar's 'Kaddish': A warning to a world out of control", link here. The new performance will have a different narration written and read by Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar. Leonard Bernstein's own memorial website has an article on it here.

You can watch on YouTube a segmented performance of the Kaddish Symphony conducted by John Axelrod, CLC Productions with the Orchestra of Paris, starting here. Pisar's text is harrowing. "My life is not my own." Play it loud.

Arlington church performs "Wise Guys: A Musical Play Based on the Book of Proverbs"

2011-05-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

Today, the youth of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington VA gave the pastoral staff a break with a service-sermon-long (29 minutes) performance of the musical play “Wise Guys: A Musical Play Based on the Book of Proverbs” by Joe Cox and Jody Lindh. The church had last performed it about seven years ago.

On the left stage, there is a fictitious breakfast setting, with Pop Tarts, which I guess is sugar-coated cereal. It’s the worst possible stuff (rather like Aphabits in the 50s) to eat if you have to get up at 5:30 AM for an early school start and have a first period test (particularly a biology test). Sugar will give you hypoglycemia, maybe pre-Type-2 diabetes, and not make you wise.

There is some expression of family values and fatherly role modeling, and a number of references to some current indie films (the kind that get on the list for AMC Independent). In particular, “The Tree of Life” (which this little musical anticipates – a biggie film coming from Brad Pitt and Sean Penn), which tests the loss of innocence of teens or young adults. Then there is Tom Shadyac’s “I Am”, when the musical refers to the idea of eating and consuming only what you need (taking more than you need amounts to “cancer”). Or maybe even “There Be Dragons” – partly because kids learn about the subjunctive mood in foreign language courses (any language), but mainly because Wisdom teaches us that saints have a past and sinners have a future.

The story presents a character “Wisdom” who tries to keep Bobby distracted by what he “wants”, which is potentially risque. The younger kids are presented as worker ants – which is a rather bizarre analogy (social insects sacrifice their workers for the good of the hive; it’s a trick of civilization to get beyond having to do that, for people). National Geographic once wrote that humans sacrifice their young men in war (and, in the past, the draft); but ants sacrifice their elderly ladies.

The Prayer on Confession defined Wisdom this way, by negation: “We delight in the idea of mutual caring and celebrating life together, but we get bogged down in our own concerns. We are too busy to seek community and too preoccupied to ponder your will for us. We go our own way, cutting ourselves off from you and one another.”

That reminds me of Philip Longman’s claim that people are getting too self-absorbed to be able to have and raise children (in any family unit).

You might want to read about “The Book of Wisdom” in the Catholic Old Testament in Wikipedia, especially the “Messianic” interpretations. I believe Leonard Bernstein addressed this topic in some of his more “modern” choral works, will look into it.

Also, yesterday, I attended a little concert with the angklung at the Embassy of Indonesia Saturday; writeup Saturday 14 in my International Issues blog.

Parry's "I Was Glad" (Royal Wedding) available from Hyperion (on Amazon), with organ

2011-05-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

In the “wake” of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine April 29, a lot of public interest surfaced in the great processional music, a setting of a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry, “I was glad when they said unto me”.

I found it on Amazon on Hyperion, a CD that dates to 1988, with Christopher Robinson conducting the Choir of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and Roger Judd, organ.

The 5-minute hymn is performed here with organ, but the orchestral transcription is more effective, I think.

The Hymn was originally written for the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902. In C Major, it makes a teasing false start with a minor interval, with a theme that resembles that of the slow movement of Nielsen’s Second Symphony (the “Phlegmatic” temperament). But the music quickly becomes loud and virile, bringing to mind Vaughn Williams and “Toward the Unknown Region”.

The CD includes a 12 minute “Evening Service in D Major”, “The Great”; and then Six a cappella "Songs of Farewell" (which sound a bit conventional to me).

There follows a 15 minute cantata “Hear my words, ye people”, which is quiet for much of its duration but rises to triumph, and then the familiar hymn, “Jerusalem: And did those feet in ancient time”), with a triumphant, modal theme in E-flat.

Many denominations include a lot of Parry in their hymnals.

There was a brief wait from Amazon to get this CD, which is no surprise. It’s CDA66273.

"Roadside America": a miniature village and model railroad that treats time as a basic dimension of physics

2011-05-10T20:45:00.000-07:00

Today, I made a reprisal visit to “Roadside America”, a miniature village and model railroad exhibit (large!) off I-78 in Shartlesville, PA, about 45 miles NE of Harrisburg. I had visited it once before, back in 1992. The website for the attraction is here.

The project was started decades ago by Mr. Laurence T. Gieringer and his family.

What’s interesting to me is the concept of a train running through time, as if time were itself another dimension on the layout. The “main circle” is about 1/3 the way in from the edge; it seemed to have a passenger train running counterclockwise and a coal train running clockwise when I was there. The layout is so big it is hard to trace the “graph” (in mathematical terms) of the tracks completely. The tour progresses counterclockwise; but it one does the tour clockwise, one advances in time, roughly speaking (not always consistently). There is an “old west” town on the first corner, and diagonally across the exhibit from that is the largest town, “Fairfield”, which looks like a town of the 50s, but there are building said to have an architecture of 19^th century. There is a Pioneer Village, and various other artifacts of different time eras often close together.

The exhibit also simulates night, during which it plays the “Star Spangled Banner” and then Kate Smith’s wonderful rendition of “God Bless America”. I think that’s in public domain and can be posted on YouTube (but will I test their copyright school?) Kate Smith’s rendition makes me think of the days of Ronald Reagan!

One of my screenplays, “Prescience”, envisions another planet where the “masters” have set up civilizations with different levels of technology, going back in time around an annular railroad (in a “termination zone” since the planet always faces the same side to its star). When the protagonist is “abducted” he wants to perform his music, which is too advanced for the “civilization” that he is sent to, but his “friends” try to smuggle him devices from other “time periods”.

In a later screenplay, I present my protagonist in a possible “afterlife”, where he finds he can travel among different time slices that are like “plates” on a ring, and a shuttle train runs among the plates. Each plate is a replica of the other in a different time zone, and moving to any particular time period presents its own issues. One could father children in one time zone and find them grown in the next (and ready to listen to one’s composed music.) What a bad reason to have children, to satisfy one’s own ego, perhaps! (Can one have children in the afterlife? Maybe people don’t even age. They call them “angels”.)

Actually, viewed from the "Appalachian Trail" loft, the exhibit reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Rendez-vous with Rama".

The "Roadside America" miniature village has not connection to indie motion picture distributor "Roadside Attractions", other than it is a roadside attraction.

National Symphony and Jarvi: The Prokofiev Sixth really snarls; the Tchaikovsky could use some Aronofsky

2011-05-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 05, 2011, I attended a National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, conducted by Swedish guest conductor Neeme Jarvi, well known for his large catalogue of post-romantic recordings with the Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos. Tonight, the theme was Russia, but that oversimplifies.

The Event (no pun on NBC's extraterrestrial landing) opened with Alexander Glazunov’s Concert Waltz #1 in D, Op. 47, a lively piece, that left me remembering that my favorite concert waltz is still the Carousel Waltz by Rodgers.

Then Yefim Bronfman performed as soloist in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23, composed at age 34. Jarvi started the D-flat major horn theme before Bronfman was seated at the Steinway! The famous introduction is taken for granted today, but starting out a piece in the relative major can sound trite unless skillfully handled. In fact, the whole device works because the main body of the First Movement is so masterfully put together, with all its complicated rhythms, building up to a B-flat Major triumphant conclusion that got an applause in its own right. (The other masterful movement in this key is the first movement of Chopin’s Second Sonata, which also culminates in a B-flat Major climactic conclusion. On the other hand, Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo has always sounded trite to me because it does end in D-flat Major.) Two more movements follow, with the ¾ Rondo finale that was one of the earlier examples of concluding a minor-keyed piano concerto with a “big tune” in the parallel major, a concept most often associated with Rachmaninoff. (Grieg had done it already.)

Bronfman dispatched the technical difficulties easily, and sometimes seemed to want attention for what he could do as soloist – as if he wanted to be played a Tchaikovsky Piano Sonata (G or C# Minor), either an impressive piece.

Bronfman played an encore, a Liszt adaptation of an opera tune I could not identify (I’ll add when I find out.)

The encore shortened the intermission, leading us to the reason I came to the concert, to hear Prokofiev’s Symphony #6 in E-flat Minor. Who can resist this weird masterpiece? Who can pass up a piece in a minor key with six flats (the only minor key whose triad is all on black keys), starting so ambiguously in the horns, and then weaving us around with dour neoromantic melodies, with a thick palate, and Prokofiev-trademarked sense of motor-mounting. I planned the whole day around hearing this. (This whole concert was not for people who like sharps more than flats.)

But actually, in many places, the music has the sound of late Mahler (almost as much so as some of Shostakovich), particularly with the serene but anxious close of the first movement, and then at the bizarre end, where Prokofiev, after some Haydn-rondo-like merriment, brings back his snarky side. It’s wonderful; the wrong notes are just right. Finally, the last drop-roll crashes to E-flat Major. (That’s why he needed six flats for his opening movement, not one sharp.) The whole effect, however, has a well-known precedent: the Rondo finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.

The Kennedy Center preceded the concert with a free Hall performance from the Levine School of Music, with young people playing Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture (in C), and then some jazz, which it played much better.

Outside, in the Potomac, high school rowing teams practiced (or maybe college). Washington-Lee High School maybe? Reminds me of the “Winklevi” (as both Piers Morgan and Mark Zuckerberg call the twins in “The Social Network”; but there was no Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt tonight; stay with Prokofiev.)

Club 930 in DC presents "The Shpongletron Experience" (and what is it?)

2011-05-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I finally made it to a show at the Club 930 on V Street in Washington DC (near Howard University and the Town-DC. The basic website for the venue (and this concert) is this.

Because the club accepts all ages for admission and most shows are rather “PG-13” in nature, it is very strict about identifying everyone for alcohol. You put your hand down on what looks like a fingerprint press to get a readmission stamp .

The venue is run is an manner similar to "Poisson Rouge" in New York, which I discussed here Oct. 19, 2010, with shows most days and different artists almost every day, and apparently opportunities for new artists to appear.

The show tonight was “The Shpongletron Experience” by The Shpongle. What is this? It’s about like asking “What Is the Event”? Wikipedia describes it as a psychedelic trance project from the UK. You can check “Twisted Music” (link) or Australia’s site. Here is their tour itinerary on Jambase, link. "Coast to Coast" has an informatory link here. I also see that Shpongle has its own Blogger thread here.

Let me give my own summary of what I saw. I arrived at the scheduled 7 PM; the formal “show” started right around 8 PM. The set has a Zardoz-Head with various appendages. The first part of the show comprised a young man playing “drums” (of sort) to music that sounded as if came from a chase scene in NBC’s “The Event”. I expected Sofia to appear any moment. Behind the bongo player was a video screen with very creatively conceived animation, mostly consisting of two kinds of sequences. One set is a series of settings, where one is in some sort of urban canyon on another planet (after an abduction, or perhaps passing at death), in some great artificial chasm, that changes appearance. As in a dream (“Inception”), you don’t know how you got there. Another set comprises organic shapes evolving into life-forms, often toward the arthropod or mollusk, as if to show the possibilities for extraterrestrial life. Other additions to the video seem to recall Koyaanisqatsai. This part of the show embeds an independent film experience as well as a stage component.

Then, around 10 PM, much of the stage is broken down, and followed by a second “post-Intermission”, where all kinds of organic images are placed on the Zardoz-head and the appendages, including the Roving Eye of a Stephen King novel. The DJ sits on top.

The show as not sold out at the beginning, but by 9 PM the dance floor was pretty full, and there was a waiting line outside as I left about 10:30. The crowd was “mixed” and even "mainstream" (some people I recognized from Town and Cobalt, along with plenty of people from the straight slate side of college life (as shown in “The Social Network”, perhaps -- plenty of "thirsty scholars" here). But it was the behavior on the floor that was interesting. “Dirty dancing” was minimal (this is supposed to be OK for kids, as I said, more or less PG-like). Instead, much of the crowd raised its arms and then jumped vigorously in unison, exactly as Arthur C. Clarke describes on the final page of his novel “Childhood’s End” (and I don’t know why that isn’t a movie yet). The psybience takes over, as the celebrants join together in a common experience, losing some part of individual consciousness, willing to accept the idea that a future universe may have fewer fully granualized indivuals and instead emphasis a shared journey. It’s a daring but necessary thought.

I met some people; one group was there for a birthday party; then I encountered a “just married” (I think) couple (man and woman – you have to say that these days in DC) who did not have the financial backing of William and Catherine but had the same celebratory spirit. Maggie Gallgaher would be pleased.

It’s rather amazing to see that so many people in this age group and in this economy can afford to fill a place like this up on a spring weeknight. Just as in a conventional disco, most people here look lean and healthy, as if self-selected. Real world exercise is good for you.

Shpongle Official has a YouTube video excerpt to watch here:

Let me add one dancer's "physic's experiment" with lights and "persistence of vision" that takes in stills only by playing with shutter speed. In motion, it's effective.

Is Mozart's music specifically helpful in treating autism?

2011-04-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, April 6, NBC4 in Washington DC presented a report on a family that says that its daughter was successfully brought out of autism by “Auditory Integration Training” comprising in some part listening to the music of (W.A.) Mozart. The news story talked about Mozart’s “songs” which sounds like an inappropriate terminology in most cases. The claim was that the wide range of frequencies in the music helped the girl listen to sounds she was hearing.

The story mentioned a more specific type of experiece called "Lollipop Listening Therapy". The website for this treatment seems to be here.

“Auditory Integration Training” has this site. Is the term interchangeable with "Auditory Integration Therapy"?

I recall a friend early in my college years (those lost William and Mary days in 1961) who said that Mozart had composed “the real music” because his music “makes sense”. There is a certain sense of logic to it that is unique, in almost every symphony, concerto, opera, and the like – which makes the effect, say, of the (catastrophic but major-keyed) ending of “Don Giovanni” or the Requiem so powerful. Could that be the key to success of the treatment?

One could ask the same thing about Beethoven. What’s the effect of the late quartets, or say the Op. 111 Piano Sonata?

In fact, the mother Sharon Ruben has a book “Awakening Ashley: Mozart Knocks Autism on its Ear”, publisher iUniverse, Amazon link here.

The NBC-Washington story was not yet available online as of this writing.

Autism is much more common in males than females. "Asperger's Syndrome" is considered an autism spectrum "disorder", but in the mildest forms, there's a good question to whether it should be. "Loners" who maintain a certain social distance sometimes accomplish great things.

While writing this posting, I played the little orchestral suite from Mozart's "Idomeneo", K. 366. By the K300's. Mozart's mature kind of pathos (as in the E-flat Sinfonia Concertante). That William and Marry friend gave me an old record of the B-flat Cassation (K 99) and the early D Major Divertimento. He thought that was part of the "real music". He also said nobody should play Beethoven until he was 30.

Andrew Lunsford: "The Accidental Tenor"

2011-04-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon, CNN’s Ali Velshi (on CNN Money) aired the story of Andrew Lunsford, who at 30 won a voice competition (in the National Association of Teachers Singing Competition in 2009) and also the Denver Lyric Opera Guild Competition and now attends the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (link).

He has his own account of this here.

Here is CNN’s account of “The Accidental Tenor”. This is a "second career", as the story indicates; he moved his family from Colorado to Bloomington, IN.

Second picture: I found a roll of my late Mother's film, and this seems to be from a trip to Madrid 10 years ago. I'll try to use the ones I can salvage!

Indiana University is also where composer Tudor Dominik Maican attends college, but as a biochemistry major, as I recall, from what he told me in 2009.

I "recovered" my earliest lost manuscripts with Casio and Logic Express on the Mac

2011-04-15T07:08:00.000-07:00

Recently, I keyed in the “lost manuscripts” of two of my earliest compositions into my Casio Digital Piano hooked up to my Apple Mac PowerBook through USB, using Logic 9 Express. I “reconstructed” the four movements of an F Major Sonatina (age 13), and the first movement and Minuet of the A Major Sonata (Age 15).

Both pieces sound perfunctory, in a way that can be oddly effective. The A Major opens with a scale, in dotted rhythms, over an alberti bass; the scale then simply returns downward as an answer, as if a kind of dialogue (or maybe soliloquy).

A chum at William and Mary that fall of 1961 said “he knew” when he heard the A Major theme in a piano practice room over in the old Ewell Hall (at the time, to the left of the Wren Building). He claimed he played it for friends, by ear, while home for Christmas in California. It’s funny how these tall tales stick.

I put the keyboard on a metal table, and the computer behind it. Haven’t assembled the kit yet.

One thing, though: Logic has a way of assuming everything is in 4/4 time, even a Minuet, and making it look like your music has a lot of “accidental” polytonality. It doesn’t get the enharmonics right. But maybe that’s a matter of steady playing. I still think it was be pretty hard to play an Op. 111 well on a digital piano.

Good work last Sunday at the Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington for the Youth choral concert, joining forces with a group from Ardmore, PA.

"DADT repeal" service inspires a jazz concert

2011-04-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

Today, at a “service” celebrating the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” at an Arlington VA Unitarian church (see my GLBT blog today), several groups presented mostly New Orleans jazz music in what made the service partially a concert.

The opening improvisations were provided by Nguyen Nguyen and Friends, and the choral song “Everything Possible” by Fred Small was sung a cappella. But the main musical attraction occurred as the New Orleans Second Line Dixieland Direct Jazz Band marched with the “funeral cortege” for the parchment of the DADT policy, playing a variety of improvisations and ending with “All the Saints come marching in.”

I used to hear that improvisation is the heart of jazz, which always seemed anti-emotional to me. That is until composers like Gershwin mixed it with classical postromantic idioms. One of the best examples of this blend occurs in Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphony #2” called the “Age of Anxiety”, which is almost a piano concerto. I played Bernstein’s own DG recording the other day. The work is in six sections, but the first three sections (a dirge theme followed by variations which develop the theme in almost sonata-like fashion, ending in a violent climax) comprise what would normally be a “first movement”. The fourth section ("The Dirge") is totally dodecaphonic, and functions as the “slow movement”, building twelve tone chords in a manner reminiscent of Alban Berg’s “Lulu”. The fifth section ("The Masque") is a “scherzo” and sounds a lot like improvised Dixieland jazz, just as in this event. The last section ("The Epilogue" a la Sir Arnold Bax) is a majestic slow movement, with the piano appearing only at the end, inspired it seems by both Copland’s Third Symphony and the triumphant slow movement conclusion of Mahler’s Third (since Bernstein became a great exponent of many of the lesser played Mahler symphonies, following Bruno Walter). The work ends in glory, with fortissimo seventh and ninth chords (I think based on D-flat major), sounding strangely conclusive in dissonance, mixing jazz and post-romanticism in the same moments.

As I parked for the event, Sirius XM on my car radio played Bruno Mars “Just the Way You Are”. It sounded fitting. And the burial of the DADT parchment reminded me of the sea burial at the end of Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd”, an opera which curiously anticipates some of the social issues that led to “don’t ask don’t tell”

Han Zimmer's "Inception" Suite (rather a Passacaglia) makes concert music in its own right

2011-03-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

The BluRay DVD package for the WB film “Inception” supplement includes a 38-minute orchestral suite by Hans Zimmer, which would make an interesting concert item in its own right.

The suite has ten sections with various titles, such as “We Built our own World”, “Dream Is Collapsing”, “One Simple Idea”, “Dream Within a Dream”, “Paradox”, and “Time”.

The entire suite, as well as all of the music in the film, is based on a four note (and four chord) motto, or ground bass, making the piece a bit like a passacaglia, though in quadruple time. Sometimes the motto is expanded to 6/4 time with one chord played four times on beats 1, 2, 4, and 5, giving a menacing effect. In “Mombasa” the music has a disco-like effect. In a few places, it resembles John Barry’s music in “Body Heat”, and a few others, Anton Bruckner (the Ninth Symphony).

The film is reviewed on the movies blog July 16, 2010.

Bruckner's Gods: The Ninth Symphony is made whole

2011-03-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

Today, I picked up the Naxos 2-CD set of the “completed” Symphony #9 in D Minor by Anton Bruckner, which had been dedicated “To God”. The performance is by the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Westphalia, conducted by Johannes Wildner. The finale, all 23:28 of it, is on a second CD by itself, maybe the shortest CD I have. They could have added the “Te Deum”, originally proposed as a finale.

In fact, the awesome first movement, with its leaping octaves and crashing, evolving dissonances does invoke the idea of a God to be feared; the conclusion of the First Movement sounds like an Old Testament apocalypse.

The Scherzo has its own menace, and the E Major Adagio used to the main event for the work. It is constant chromatic, opening with the interval of a 9^th.

This work has significance to me. In December 1961, shortly after I returned home to Arlington from my “William and Mary Expulsion” (covered in my main blog), I did buy the Bruno Walter performance (3 movements) on Columbia. I got to know the music during a very trying time in my life (and for my parents). The old RCA Victor record player had a lot of trouble with the inner groves of this long record, and that led to an advancement in my stereo technology those days, a VM stereo. (Until 1961, we didn’t know better than to use sapphire needles.) . Wildner’s tempos seem just a little brisk compared to what I had been used to with Bruno Walter.

The notes give a lot of details as to the nearly complete condition of the Finale (it was second-to-last), an claims that the “reconstruction” by Samale, Phillips, Cohrs, and Mazzuca from 1991 and 1996 is the best possible. This was not available to me during my college recovery (and NIH) days.

The Finale has all the mannerisms that derive from the first three movements, and a noble descending tetrachordal theme that resembles Han Zimmer’s music for “Inception”. The fugal coda brings back the galloping octaves from the first movement, and build an “epilogue” in D major, with tetrachords flashing around, slowing down in a locomotive-like fashion, braking, and opening up to the Light as in Wagner’s Gotterdamerung, which is so obviously the inspiration. I thought about that little top-thimble spinning as the last image in “Inception”, but I knew I was not dreaming, I was still alive.

PBS airs "Scott Houston: The Piano Guy"

2011-03-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, March 6, WETA aired a two-hour piano lesson program by Scott Houston, “The Piano Guy”,

with a basic link here, or his basic website here. The process is called "Play Piano in a Flash: 3 Steps to Piano Success". Were it that simple!

The class, in which each student had a small greatly reduced keyboard, offered to teach people who to play songs for social occasions without having to read much staff music. He made a comment about what mind of music works at social occasions, and that may not always be a Bach Musette or Mozart “Turkish Sonata” – but then again, it might.

There were some interesting points. The piano doesn’t have to be tuned and manipulated before playing it every time (a “real” piano has to be tuned occasionally), and you don’t need to build up calluses. (You do need to trim fingernails, which are “dead” appendages, like hair!) But “novices” have a real deal with the complexity of notation.

Actually, it seems like an accident of physics that a scale of twelve notes per octave (doubling of frequency) works so well (and composers use microtones so rarely). But it’s arbitrary that we use “C” as the middle note, rather than “A”. There is an arithmetic system for learning how key signatures (with sharps or flats) work, and also a mathematical system for meter. For kids, proficiency in music tends to go hand in hand with proficiency in math.

Here’s another trick: composers of piano music know that it’s easier to play fast passages with many black keys (like D-flat Major), than in native “C major”. Chopin and Liszt were particularly fond of using the black keys heavily.

It’s interesting, to someone with nine years piano and years of classical record collecting and some ties to the arts community, how people sell “music” (or subscription tickets to performances) for a living. Sales and art creation are not the same activities, psychologically speaking.

PBS airs 25th Anniversary "Les Miserables"

2011-03-06T20:19:00.000-08:00

Sunday night, March 6, PBS stations followed on, one week after the Oscars, with their own “Event”, the re-airing of the recent 25^th Anniversary concert at the O2 in London of the musical "Les Miserables", with a typical link here (for WETA)

The donations for the show and for WETA support (including DVD’s and other thank you gifts) are processed here at 888-202-2777. This is becoming important as the GOP is likely to force budget cuts on PBS and arts support.

The musical is based on the famous novel by Victor Hugo. The other details are: book by Alain Boublil, music by Claude-Michele Schoenberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, based on the novel by Victor Hugo (didn't we all read portions of it in high school French? -- one of my high school finals was to write an essay on the book), I did see this musical performed at the National Theater in Washingtonin Jan 2006, as directed by Cameron Mackintosh .

The plot, of redemption and revolution by common people, is well known enough, but it is the soaring melodies, including an encore finale (“Do You Hear the People Singing?”) where numerous singers play Jean Valjean, that make the musical famous. It’s ironic to see such music from a composer named “Schonberg”, except that the “real” Arnold Schonberg produces his own chills-and-fever with the Mahler-like Gurrelieder, with its brazen closing pages (which are rarely performed well). For this concert, video of the finale encore was broadcast into the show from the 1985 original.

The new cast tonight featured, above all, Nick Jonas as Marius, and Nick dominated much of the performance. This is Nick’s shining moment so far. For the first time, he appears in public as a fully grown man. Here’s another link on his appearance.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS Specials.

I've attended one show on the London West End, "Evita", in 1982 (with clubbing and disco in SoHo afterwards).

Wikipedia attribution link for a West End scene is here.

Anton Bruckner's Gods: some composers' early works are their best; A note about Mac Logic

2011-03-03T18:09:00.000-08:00

The other day, I played Riccardo Chailly’s 1984 recording (CD on London) of the “Vienna” version of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony #1 in C Minor, as revised in 1890, after the composer had started all of his symphonies. Bruckner used C Minor twice in a row (#1 and #2), and then again in #8, the last symphony that he would complete.

I had a DG record of the earlier Linz version, which sounds almost Schubertian (which is not to put it down). But the 1891 Vienna version (not to be confused with the notorious “Vienna Variation” in chess) really does strive to invoke the Apocalypse, “The Event” (yes, “They” are going to take Earth back, if you haven’t heard yet). The tempos slow down to a crawl in the finale and the composer takes us through every chromaticism, stretto and passing tone imaginable, almost as if he wanted to enumerate all possible consequences of the famous dissonance in the development section of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony first movement. Finally, we are in another parallel universe, but anchored on C octaves. The life we left was transient after all. But we know that something of each one of us will go on, forever.

The rhythm in the Finale appears in Bernard Hermann's score for "Vertigo" at some of the most critical moments.

Sergei Rachmaninoff would pull the same hat trick on one of his early works, the Piano Concerto #1 in F# Minor, in 1917 (not so late in his life, however). He would trim it down and make it leaner, and take out the finale “big tune” which ought to sound rich in F-sharp, but which musicologists say seemed trite compared to the success Rachmaninoff had with the thrilling conclusions of his Second and Third Concertos.

Sometimes early works turn out to be more daring than later well accepted “masterpieces”. Dvorak’s Symphony #1 in C Minor may be his longest, and the finale has truly daring experiments with continued dissonance in its development section; the closing pages of the finale are brazen, and not done justice by conductors. The Second, in B-flat, is also daring harmonically. Both early symphonies have expansive slow movements.

Of course, we all know that Richard Strauss wrote many of his famous tone poems early.

I've ordered the Naxos recording of the "completed" Bruckner Ninth and comment later.

I’ve connected Logic Express 9.0 to my new Casio digital piano, and started experimenting, leading to the idea of getting my own youthful works saved on a computer, printed, maybe published and performed professionally (after considerable editing). I must say that an inexperienced Logic user will create polytonality unintentionally, whether useful or not (you don’t need Mozart’s Coronation Concerto as a starting point). It seems a bit like Cakewalk, but with even more features (even in Logic Express).