WMV Music Web Log

The October 5 concert is pretty well in shape, so it's time to think about new plans, ideas, etc. Hans Gal is a composer I'm interested in; very tough to find his stuff - I ordered his saxophone sonata yesterday ($50) from a saxophone music website. He wrote lots of chamber music, but none of my sources carry any of it. The Gal website contacts appear to be relatives of the composer in England. I will contact them. Also, I have been listening to tenor Martin Dillon's lovely recording of the Robert Kahn songs with piano trio, from Paul Heyse's "Jungbrunnen". I have that score already. We can do it! I want to do more Piano Quintets with Sally McLain, June Huang, Kim Buschek, and Jodi Beder, the string quartet that performed in Evolutions III and will play on October 5. Among the quintets that interest me are Beach, Harbison, Shostakovich, Bacewicz, Dohnanyi, Bartok, Faure #2, Schumann, Gubaidulina, Foote, Chadwick, Price, Mason, Bloch, Bax, Bridge, Brod, Diamond, Ginastera, Goosens, Granados, Kahn, Laks, Martin, Milhaud, Piston, Ran, Reger, Rudhyar, Schmitt, Schnittke, Suk, Szell, Toch, Webern, Widor. There should be enough to keep us busy and our audiences interested for awhile.

David Cheng came over last night to install some powerful software - a mail list management program (we have been using a decade old My Mail List, a wonderfully simple piece of software the has served us well, but we have grown beyond). Also, a program which will allow us to manage the website without knowing html (David does all that himself right now, not the most efficient use of his time). And also, the software that allows us to upload images to the photo gallery. That was fun! I was up past midnight putting up photos, including the rehearsal photos that Marilyn shot yesterday morning.

The Post called at dinnertime to say that a reviewer would cover the October 5 concert - this is good! They also wanted a photo - and although we have great candids (see the website photo gallery!), we have never posed for anything. So Marilyn and I looked around for a blank wall, very tough to find in our artist house, possibly only in Mar's study, if the bird painting comes down temporarily off the wall. We will try to pose the quartet against this lilac backdrop tomorrow, and see what we get. The women are all so photogenic, and my hair is nicely silver, so we should be able to get a grabby photo. Last time we sent them something, they couldn't use it because we had messed it up with our primitive photoshop skills - Marilyn didn't like the color of my shirt (or was it David Teie's?).

Oh, and the rehearsal - it was great!

What is our vision and where are we going? We just got our 2003 IRS "990" form filled out (thanks to Cecily Slater, our superb accountant) and reported briefly on "what was achieved in carrying out the organization's exempt purposes" in that year.

"Washington Musica Viva, Inc. was formed to further public appreciation and understanding of classical and contemporary chamber music; to advance the performance and composition of chamber music; to create and maintain a chamber music ensemble; to provide opportunities for public music performance; to organize, sponsor, or present, alone or in conjunction with other persons or organizations, public musical and collaborative performances." (From the WMV Articles of Incorporation)

"During FY2003 Washington Musica Viva produced eleven concerts: five of these were at BannerArts Studio in Kensington MD; two were at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington DC; one at Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire; one at The Dennis & Phillip Ratner Museum in Bethesda MD; and two were for chamber music presenting organizations in the Washington area. The total combined audience for all of these concerts was about 1000 people. Twenty-seven musicians, four composer-presenters, three visual artists, and seven poets participated in these programs."

It looks to me like we are pretty well on track. We do what we said we would do. WMV has now been incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization for more than 6 years. Right now the organization's budget is very small, under $25K annually; but we feel that we are poised to grow. We have assembled a powerful board of directors under the masterful guidance of Rhonda Buckley, Founder and Executive Director of the Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts, including Rhonda as Chair, Jonathan Morris, Director of the Washington DC Chapter of the American Composers Forum, David Cheng, of David Cheng IT Consulting Services, and Alice Sims, Founder and Director of Art for the People. Busy as they all are, they are full of great ideas, they really understand the mission of WMV, and they have pledged to demand results.

Learning to take the organization and organizational issues as seriously as artistic issues is the challenge which Marilyn and I are now facing. I must think differently about an organization which I had secretly regarded as a counter-cultural response to the ills of the art world and the cultural community at large. After all, one of the names we considered in 1998 for the organization was "Last Gasp Productions, Inc." If we really do get substantial community support, it may be harder to see WMV as the "outsider." I have some confidence that we can make this transition: after all, both Marilyn and I have become experienced administrators in other areas, almost in spite of ourselves. And it is very exciting to see a human enterprise that we believe in become bigger than the one or two individuals that set it in motion.

Thinking about what it is we do that's special or different: well, for one thing, we are not limited to a small slice of music - "standard repertoire", or "new music", for instance. Monday night we did a program of African-American art songs at the Lithuanian Embassy. Gary Poster sang, and he was spectacular. It was a very big success, especially with the African-Americans, who represented about half the crowd. Where else (besides maybe Howard University Music Department) are people going to hear this music? We have performed programs of women composers, Jewish/Israeli composers, Baroque, contemporary, Czech, neglected or unfamiliar works by classical composers, the standard repertoire, local composers, jazz influenced, works by neglected or unknown composers, even Dylan songs, often mixing them all together, using winds, percussion, strings, vocals, electric guitar, and piano, in ensembles ranging from solo to 8 pieces with conductor. We have collaborated with performance artists, jazz and folk musicians, visual artists, scientists, and poets. We maintain a standard of the highest excellence, without pretension, preciousness, or snobbery. We have performed most of the chamber music of Brahms, Dvorak, Faure, Chopin, and Schumann; we have ongoing relationships with world renowned composers such as Libby Larsen, John McCabe and Hanus Barton. We have created a new way to deliver what in Europe was called "chamber music", adapted to the social, cultural, and economic realities of 21st century American life. We play in a warehouse/art studio, in churches, art galleries, libraries, conference rooms, Embassies, museums, concert halls, schools, private homes, and even on the street. The musicians in our ensembles participate eagerly and enthusiastically, because it is what they do best, love most, and are most rarely asked to do. Most important of all, the people who comprise our audience community feel that what we do is relevant, exciting, and beautiful. It feeds their lives in ways that they feel are important and unique. How do we know? They fill our concerts, often to overflowing, and they tell us so.

I worked on the Copland Quartet last night - written in 1950, the opening theme combines "Three Blind Mice" with "Rock of Ages", an interesting meditation on post-holocaust Judaism. (It is my impression that the "three blind mice" tune has been used as an anti-semitic taunt, but I have not yet been able to document this). In any event, the Quartet seems to be a kind of musical counterpart to Art Spiegelman's "Maus". The middle movement is really funny - it is very shtetl, yiddish comedy, lower east side 1950s. Copland seems to have had a European side, and it was very Jewish. His American face is what we normally see, and he probably had good reasons for this. It's actually not just that it sounds "American": it's that the music sounds WASP. Only "Vitebsk", the Quartet, and maybe the Sextet show this other Jewish face, as far as I know. Although I admire the mastery of his scores, and am moved by works like his violin sonata and "The Tender Land," it irritates me that he has sanitized some of his music, eliminating all the Jewish dirt from his creative process. Oh well; I didn't know Copland was a Jew until I put together a program of Jewish composers about five years ago.

I am also working on a program of songs by African-American composers with bass Gary Poster. These composers are mining a tremendously rich cultural tradition, and it is exciting to get to know them. As Americans, we can draw on a broader set of sources. I met with John Kamman and Grace Chung the other night to talk about further steps in our Evolutions project, to forge a synthesis of American chamber music and jazz. We came up with some new ideas - we'll see what happens. I want to learn to appreciate the emotional/musical mechanics of jazz standards enough to arrange one for chamber ensemble, and also to effectively apply jazz improvisatory style to German lied. Why not?

From Michael Strand:

Dear Carl,

Your Sep. 1 note resonated with me. As you can imagine, I've needed some distraction these days, and it comforted me to listen (maybe for the first time) to the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It made me happy to the point of tears to imagine Linda on the other side experiencing the wild joy suggested by that music! The main theme (Ode to Joy) is familiar and got me started, and I sang along (La da da da, La da da da, ...)! But the passages near the end take it to a new level - ecstatic and irrepressible. In the past I'd thought of these passages as disjointed or disorganized, but now they sound to me like spontaneous explosions of laughter, bliss, happiness -- perfect for what I believe Ludwig was trying to express. In those moments I thanked God for that music.

No, not a time to fall silent, whatever your woes or concerns. The Beethoven music mentioned above must have sounded experimental in his time, and even now it surprises me with its originality. So we listen with changed hearing to old music and also hope for new music with an ability to comfort us deeply or to give us exciting new perceptions. This may well be experimental music that breaks the molds we've become complacent with. Such molds can be comforting to a degree, but maybe, as in my case, more than just ordinary comfort was needed!

Mike

Judi Tenhunen's latest postcard mail art arrived: Prow of an aqua boat against blue sky with dragonfly. "Odonation - see what I might have missed..." (poem by jt):

I glide in an aqua kayak.
Rushes (I do not)
border the lake, define my way,
and shade ragged mounds
of branches - no architect's delight
yet, I'm told, they well house
their builders; otters who appear
(well, actually they don't)
to deny us presence.

A dragonfly arrives
to rest on my prow, coal-black wing pairs
stilled, allowing a turguoise
jewel of a body to gleam in my sight.
A surprise of an opportunity
to bask in beauty for a timeless moment.

The Baltimore Sun says that I'm
"odonating"!*

*8/24/04 "odonating, the pursuit of dragonflies"

Thanks, Judi!

Man, it is really hard to think the same way about music when there is so much violence and war and crisis in the news. I am seeking music which comforts me, music I have known since childhood, or music which is so compelling it distracts me from the news. Unfortunately I have discovered that I can practise with the news on the radio.

I have no particular insights or expertise in thinking about world events - I am not even sure how useful it is for me to know about all this stuff. Sometimes I keep Marilyn awake at night reporting on some puzzling or horrifying event.

This does not seem to be a time when anyone has much attention for exciting new experimental music. These ideas will have to wait for a calmer time. Nevertheless, I know that music and art sustain my soul in the face of everything, and this must be true for many others as well. In this time of war, falling silent is no help to anyone, I guess.