WMV Music Web Log

Did I mention that we got a grant from The Randy Hostetler Living Room Fund to produce a concert featuring the premiere of Masatoshi Mitsumoto's cello concerto? It is a particularly exciting and appropriate honor for us, because this fund supports "experimental music, new artistic ideas, performance art, multimedia performance, live art, improvisation and avant garde creative endeavors of all kinds." Amy Leung will play the solo part, and Masa and I will recruit a small string orchestra. We plan to do it in March or April at The Dennis & Phillip Ratner Museum.

The season is quickly taking shape - the front end is looking like mostly comfort food, but that seems to be what I want right now. Brahms, Dvorak, Chopin, Faure, a little jazzier stuff with Bolcom, Korngold, and Weill songs, oh yes, and the Stephen Paulus "Long Shadow of Lincoln." Even the Copland Quartet looks like comfort food, although it might not have looked like that a few years ago.

The spring will be a little different maybe. We have designs on some more Arthur Jarvinen, some David Diamond, more Libby Larsen, and some contemporary Czech music. Also, we are thinking about producing a children's concert - that could be very interesting and fun.

Marilyn and I had a memorable conversation about seven years ago with pianist/composer Burnett Thompson after one his wonderful sets at the West End Cafe, where for many years he provided a mixture of improvised jazz and sophisticated classical repertoire. We were complaining as we often did in those days about the difficulties of being artists in Washington (no venues, no support, no interest, hostile press, etc etc). He was one of the people who told us to stop belly-aching, and said something like, "you guys have much richer lives than the wealthy people in Potomac."

I have been thinking about this recently, in the context of recent conversations with Washington arts folks, and their feelings of frustration and discouragement. Perhaps we should take stock of what immense inner wealth we share as artists, and clarify what it is we have to offer to an admittedly culturally confused and vapid looking public. Let us be clear: the public is confused because money and the "cult of things" hangs like a heavy curtain over everything, especially these days. The spirit can barely find a mousehole in the wall or crumbs for survival. But we artists manage to survive, and we share a different kind of wealth - things like happiness, wonder, creativity, joy, optimism, love, freedom, and new ideas. I think if people knew we had these things, they would want some - after all, money can't buy them!

As artists, we may be treated badly, but in truth we support the world. The world is supported by creative responses, new ideas, fearless truths, profound thought, and love. Mechanical tradition, fear, and "going through the motions" just won't hack it. An interesting feature of the 9/11 report is the recommendation that we counter terrorism by communication with Islamic cultures about values. How do we do this? How did we make our case during the cold war? Through support of free expression in the arts!!

It's good to be really passionate about something (or someone)! A clear, sharp, focused passion is a kind of an inner guide, a wind to sweep away confusion, a clarifier of issues, an anchor in the storm. I can be doing the silliest things, but if it's in the service of the people or the music that I love, it's usually no problem.

Working on the Brahms Op. 25 g minor piano quartet - I have history with this work. My aunt, Thelma Stein, performed it at the Phillips Gallery in 1953 with a group that included Paul Olefsky. The reel-to-reel tape of the performance turned up with her LP records after she moved into the assisted living facility (she is in her 90's now). A few weeks ago I had it transcribed to CD - the tape was still OK, but it had run out just seconds before the end of the last movement. It is a masterful and passionate performance. This and the few other recordings she made, as well as the numerous and amazing annotations on her scores, have made me revise my view of my aunt Thelma as a pianist and musician. This woman who suddenly ceased to perform in public in the mid-1950's was a master musician, a real concert pianist, with intelligent ideas, phenomenal technique, sensitivity and passion, and a vast and contemporary repertoire. In the finale of the Brahms, it sounds like she took the strings by surprise with a dangerous and daring opening tempo, and kept it up straight to the end!

I read through this piece with the Amadeus Quartet in Buffalo in 1970, just before they recorded it with Emil Gilels. They had asked around the music department for a pianist who would rehearse it with them before they left for Moscow, and nobody else was available, so I stayed up all night trying to learn the part. They were very kind to me, but I suspect I wasn't much help.

I also remember a rehearsal of the Brahms g minor quartet at Ursula Oppens' apartment in New York in 1965, with Ben Zander playing the cello. I'm not sure what I was doing there, (but I wasn't sure what I was doing anywhere that year). Ben had just arrived from England, and his rented car had just been stolen, so he was quite upset, and Ursula was comforting him with strawberry milkshakes, which he drank one after another.

Before we began WMV, I had the idea to start a concert series in Adams Morgan, at DCAC. Someone had left an old bar piano with them, and I asked a local piano technician to see if she could get it in some sort of functioning state. It was a white spinet that had been nailed to the bar, and I think had a mirror on one side. She managed to get the middle of the piano working by cannibalizing parts from the top and bottom notes. However, the piano was on a different level from the stage and couldn't be moved. Nevertheless, we programed the Brahms g minor piano quartet along with some Milhaud and Schumann and fliered the entire area. The string players were some excellent amateurs (one of whom I learned recently quit his job as a lawyer and joined the Birmingham Symphony). They played below me, I think. It was a great performance, to an audience of about 20.

A quick post to extol the coolness of Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music.

There is a fairy tale I used to read to Gabe when he was little - it was about the usual hero and princess who became separated through vicissitudes. The princess gave orders to have a road paved with gold leading to her castle. The evil brothers of the hero who learned of the existence of the princess would ride their horses to the side of the road paved with gold for fear of damaging its beauty. They were to be turned away by the guards. The genuine lover would be so intent on getting to her that he would not even notice the golden road, galloping his horse straight to the palace.


I like this story and other fairy tales like it; when I practise (by the way, this is how I spell "practise," not "practice" - that looks medical to me), I take heart that apparently impossible tasks can be accomplished if there is enough love. There are works of music that seem so beautiful and difficult to me that I cannot conceive of ever learning them. But when I am in love with a piece of music, all my anxieties about my physical limitations, inadequacies of various kinds, lack of appropriate venue, or impossibilities of performance - these all disappear completely, and I just leap into the task.


The most profound lesson from a childhood of music lessons and practise: learning is like grass growing through the sidewalk - imperceptibly slow, incredibly strong, and ultimately successful, if one just keeps on, without impatience and without despair.

From Mike Strand:

Carl, I liked your July 2 blog about taking another look at "classical music". I include the so-called baroque and romantic styles in this terminology. Here's what I think is the essence of your thoughts (your words):

"It is time to look at it with fresh eyes and ears, and ask what is it really saying? What is it supposed to do? Let's drop the awe and genuflection, and use our cultural heritage to save our souls".

To me this may mean taking the original composers' scores and experimenting with them according to musical styles we now like or are familiar with. For example, this could entail turning Bach pieces into tangos or jazz or swing, or arranging a Beethoven or Brahms piece into rock or broadway tunes. The experimenter should give credit of course, to the original composer for the basic musical idea.

There is wonderful music in those older compositions, and we might take some of it out of its original mold, as beautiful as that mold may be, to see more of its charm and power. For those folks hooked on the originals, let them continue to enjoy them. But for others, steeped in the music of our time, new arrangements may be the best way to see the charm of the older works, thus "saving our souls", or at least the soul of our past heritage.

Mike

(Yes, that's it exactly; at least part of it...).

I'm glad you share my enthusiasm for the Brahms sextets, David! Of course there is the anthem in the second movement of the Bb sextet op. 18, which has quite a different feeling; more like the song of the volga boatman, a kind of worksong of determination. And there is the opening theme of Faure's second Piano Quintet, which someone called the longest single motif he knew.

Anyway, I was going to blog about how classical music is dead, and how that is the context in which WMV was formed. That tradition of European classical music, with all its magnificence and pretentiousness and silliness, is really over. It doesn't mean the music is no longer of interest, but that vast repertoire has to be re-examined, sifted, and the good parts rescued, reinterpreted, even translated into something which speaks to us in the 21st century. The "classical music" thing degenerated into pompous hocus-pocus over the last 75 years or so. Now the music of the late 18th to early 20th century has become like the music of the renaissance, more dead historical artifact than living art. It is time to look at it with fresh eyes and ears, and ask what is it really saying? What is it supposed to do? Let's drop the awe and genuflection, and use our cultural heritage to save our souls.