Music Monday: Eckhardt-Gramatté: Bassoon Concerto

Christened Sofia Fridman-Kochevskaya, Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté was born in Moscow in 1899 to a rather well-off family (her mother worked as a governess in Leo Tolstoy’s household), but she didn’t live there long. Her family moved to a commune in England, and Eckhardt-Grammaté entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eight to study violin and piano. She had already made her public debuts in Berlin and Paris by the age of eleven, frequently playing both instruments on the same concert program. She was already interested in composition, but her teachers at the Conservatoire discouraged her from pursuing that path, presumably because sexism.

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A Year of Mondays

About a year ago (October 6, if you’re counting), I tripped past the 200-follower mark on tumblr, and launched a new series of posts to celebrate. Since most of you reading this are probably regular readers of the blog and have seen my Music Monday posts already, so I won’t go on about the general premise of the series; instead I want to zoom out and take a look at the series as a whole, both in terms of how it’s changed so far and in terms of where I want to take it from here.

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Music Monday: Hakim: Le Tombeau de Olivier Messiaen

Hallowe’en has come and gone, which means that today’s composer just had a birthday: Naji Hakim was born on that date in Beirut, Lebanon in 1955. A professional organist in addition to a composer, he first fell in love with the instrument at the age of five when he attended a Mass at his family’s Catholic church and was transfixed by the sounds he heard. Organ being not the easiest instrument to practice at home, his family insisted he study piano instead, a decision he was not particularly happy with. (When he was twelve, he snuck into his school’s chapel with his brother, broke into the organ room, hit the “tutti” stop, and went to town. The headmaster was . . . unimpressed.) He had non-musical interests as well, studying Engineering at the Ecole Supérieure d’Ingéneurs in Beirut until an outbreak of war in 1975 forced the school to close, at which point he emigrated to Paris to finish his studies.

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To My Rationalist Friends

We need to have a talk.

Over the past two weeks, there have been a number of demonstrations on college campus around this country protesting incidents of racist bias. As is pretty par for the course by now, these protests have generated a whole slew of online articles, which, when posted to Facebook and Twitter, have, in turn, launched some pretty sprawling comment threads. And I’ve seen you posting on some of those comment threads, and honestly, it’s been painful. You’ve come in asking questions that seem to you to be perfectly reasonable, only to be met with replies that seem prickly and unwelcoming, at times almost aggressively uninterested (it seems to you) in calm, rational, intellectual discussion of the issue at hand. Affronted by this brusque rebuff, things often escalate, and lo! a flame war is born.

This isn’t a pattern that’s new to the past two weeks. It’s something I’ve been seeing since, well, pretty much since I first signed up for social media. I am very sure I have been that person more than once in the past.

Today, I’m going to take you at your word. I’m going to assume that you genuinely don’t understand why people (and, let’s be honest, it’s usually “marginalized people on the left”) are so worked up about the latest clash in the college campus culture wars, that you’re asking questions from a place of open-minded naïveté in a good-faith attempt to understand what’s going on. (If that’s not the case, if you feign ignorance just so you can get a rise out of the other side for fun, you are petty and cruel and should feel ashamed. If you deliberately cause pain to other people solely for your own enjoyment, I have nothing more to say to you.) I’m going to try to meet you on your own ground and do my best to answer those honest questions that cause such a fuss. I write this as someone who is sympathetic to the broader rationalist project, who shares its values of free and open inquiry and debate, of logic and carefully constructed argumentation, of searching out the truth, however uncomfortable we may be with what we find. (You might be surprised at how many people on the left share these values, even if they don’t articulate them using the same language. In positioning myself like this, I am not trying to set myself apart as Not Like Those Other People protesting systemic oppression on the left. I am writing this in the hopes that my fluency in the language of rationalist thought will help make the rationalist community — a community that I feel at least loosely affiliated with — more understanding of and dedicated to issues of social justice.)

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Music Monday: Zwilich: Violin Concerto

Zwilich understands the bassoon. Or rather, she understands the bassoonist’s way of life. “I not only don’t know how you play the bassoon, I don’t know why. You get up in the morning, you have to put this thing together. It’s got wood, which is very temperamental. It’s got cork, which is maybe even more temperamental. You’ve got to make the reed. It’s got all kinds of issues.” Painfully accurate.

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The Spigot and the Chute

I have a lot of feelings. I know, I know, this is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. But still, it’s true: Going thru life, I have lots and lots of feelings about the things I experience.

I also write music. And unlike some composers, I explicitly want my music to be emotional, to express feelings and to get people in the audience to feel things in turn.

Are these things related? Do the feelings I have in my day-to-day life translate directly into the art I make?

Well, yes and no.

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Music Monday: Solomon: Rotational Games

So even tho this is technically my “getting back into the swing of things” post, today I’m going to be doing something a bit different. Instead of featuring music that someone else wrote and I like, today I’m going to be talking about a piece that I wrote. Specifically, I’m going to be talking about the work that I premièred on my recital in September: Rotational Games.

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Stages Are Magic

TOMORROW’S THE DAY. I’m giving a recital! Of music for bassoon! And sometimes piano! Some of which I wrote! And it’s open to the public and I have heard Reasonably Authoritative Rumors that there might be Real Actual People there! Which is very exciting! And also very nerve-wracking!

And yet, despite the fact that I can already feel the jangle and buzz of pre-performance anxiety, I’m pretty confident that come 3:00 tomorrow, I’m going to be fine. 

It’s all about the head game. Much of my thinking on this can be traced back to Jeff Nelsen, who gave several master classes on performance anxiety when I was at the BU Tanglewood Institute Bassoon Workshop in 2009, but over the years of living it in my own performing life, I’ve added my own wrinkles and drifted into ways of preparing that work for me. (I’ve also picked up a few handy shakes from the Bulletproof Musician blog, which I highly recommend following if you’re a performer yourself.) The core of it is this:

Nothing can go wrong on stage.

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Music Monday: Beamish: Symphony No. 1

Evidently Sally Beamish (b 1956) once physically collided with Peter Pears. Pears was singing the title role* in a production of Peter Grimes, a production in which Beamish’s mother was playing in the pit. Beamish, who was eight at the time, got turned around backstage after the show, and wound up running into a “big, scary figure” who turned out to be the great English tenor. Still, she was so taken by the storm music in the opera that, upon returning home, she immediately got out some staff paper and began scribbling ideas down.

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Why You Should Never Use Rehearsal Letters

It happens to the best of ensembles: In the middle of rehearsal, something will go wrong. Rather than start all the way back at the beginning of the piece — which would waste precious rehearsal time, not to mention result in rehearsing things that are already solid — the group will pick things up somewhere in the middle. To get everyone on the same page, they’ll often find a rehearsal mark.

Rehearsal marks — in this format specifically, they’re rehearsal letters — and composers (or editors or engravers) will dot them thruout the score to mark significant landmarks in the piece to aid in the rehearsal process. In traditional Western musical notation, and still as the default setting for most engraving software today, they’ve taken the form pictured above: A capital letter inside a circle or a box. This is an unfortunate practice that should absolutely be discontinued — basically all rehearsal marks should be boxed bar numbers instead.

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Music Monday: Schoenfield: Café Music

Chances are, if you see a lot of live music, that you’ve been to one or two concerts that you described as “literally unforgettable” as you walked out the auditorium doors. Chances are, also, that you’ve forgotten more than a few that you said that about. Certainly that was the case for me with this week’s piece. I first heard it back in the summer of 2009 at the Kinhaven summer music festival, and was totally blown away by it. I then proceeded to not think about it at all until about a month ago, when I was researching the composition faculty at various grad schools I’m looking into applying to. I was on the second or third Spotify album of Paul Schoenfield’s music when I scrolled down the track listing and saw Café Music as the last offering on the disk.

“Huh,” I thought, “That title seems awfully familiar.” At first I thought I might be confusing it with something by Astor Piazzolla (an Argentinian composer famous for revolutionizing the tango, among other legacies), but as soon as I heard the opening bars, the memory of that Kinhaven concert came rushing back to me, leaving me utterly boggled as to how I could have forgotten about it so completely over the intervening half-decade.

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Special isn’t Better

I can trace my love of classical music from the moment, aged 11, I attended my first musical appreciation lesson and the needle of a badly battered record player dropped with a loud thump onto a scratchy recording of Holst's The Planets. Then I heard sounds that excited me in a way that somehow the recordings of Deep Purple and King Crimson my brothers played never did.

— Armando Iannucci, “Classical Music, the Love of My Life” (The Guardian, 13 May, 2006)

This is an old article (at least by internet standards), but it’s been making the rounds again recently, and it always gives me a lot of feelings. It’s an excellent speech, and there’s so much that could be said about it, from the importance of early music education to the non-judgemental openness of people who don’t know what they’re not “supposed” to like, from the sacredness of the paradoxically private experience of going to a live concert to not being moved by Mozart and so much more. But today I want to zoom in on that one quote, because it touches on an attitude that’s pretty common among classical musicians, and it’s one that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

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Music Monday: Auerbach: Cetera Desunt

Until 1991, Lera Auerbach was shaping up to be an extraordinary Soviet musician. Born in Chelyabinsk, a city near Siberia, in 1973, she received her earliest music lessons from her mother, and took to them like a fish to water. By the age of 12, she had written an opera, one which was performed in several cities, and was also making waves as a concert pianist. It was as a pianist that she came to the United States in 1991, performing a series of concerts and ultimately deciding not to return to the Soviet Union. She was thus one of the last musicians to defect before the Cold War ended later that year.

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Don’t Be Boulez

When the French high modernist Pierre Boulez was studying with René Leibowitz, the older composer dared to suggest several places in which his student’s first piano sonata could stand some improvement. Hugely affronted, Boulez — who had been planning to dedicate the sonata to Leibowitz — screamed “Vous êtes merde!” (“You are shit!”) and stormed from the room. Later, when preparing the sonata for publication, he saw the dedication on the title page and viciously scratched it out with a letter opener.

This is, to put it mildly, not the most graceful way to handle criticism. And yet, I’ve definitely been there. Composing is intense, intimate stuff, and even mild criticism, gently couched, can feel like an attack on you as a person and everything you hold dear. When it’s not couched gently, when it digs below surface slip-ups to target the fundamental structure of a work, it can cut like the most vicious of knives. 

And yet, criticism is an integral part of creative life. You don’t get better without people pointing out where you’ve gone astray, often repeatedly and at length. How do you handle someone tearing into something you wrote without comparing them to excrement and symbolically stabbing them in the face?

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Of Magyrs and Manticores

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. A lot a lot. Even when I basically stopped leisure reading in college, fantasy literature was never far from my mind, and now that I’ve started up again, my “books to read” list is split pretty evenly between fantasy novels and everything else. I have fond memories of many of these books, but I’d be hesitant to read most of them again. As I’ve read more and more, my tastes have sharpened — I’ve become able to appreciate things I couldn’t before, but there are also things that bother me now in narrative fiction that I used to pass by with blithe indifference. Some books, however cherished in my memory, come with big, stark signs saying “do not revisit these waters lest you rend the glowing shroud of nostalgia asunder”. (My subconscious is kind of wordy.)

The Orphan’s Tales, by Catherynne M Valente, is not one of those books.

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Music Monday: Jubilee Riots: Penny Black

Just because I mostly write classical music (or whichever of the other imperfect monikers you prefer) doesn’t mean it's the only genre of music I listen to, let alone the only genre I get excited enough to geek out about. I may not have the same deep knowledge and stylistic vocabulary to engage it with, but there’s an awful lot of great music out there that does things to me that trio sonatas simply don’t. So this week we peek out from our usual waters to check out Jubilee Riots’ album, Penny Black.

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Why Textbook Publishing Makes Me Sad

It’s that time of year again! As we get closer to the start of a new semester and a new school year, various lists of sites are going around telling you where you can find cheap used copies of textbooks, or even free downloads thereof. Many of these posts also paint textbook companies as greedy, scheming monstrosities whose sole goal is to fleece hapless college students of their paltry, desperately-needed-for-other-things funds. I’m not interested in commenting about the legality or ethics of these sites (broadly speaking, the cheap used ones are legal and the free downloads aren’t, tho there may be exceptions to that for individual cases #IAmNotALawyer), but I do want to address that portrayal of publishing companies.

My mom works as a production editor at one such company, you see, and from hearing her talk about her work, I have a bit more of an insider’s perspective on the industry. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not full of self-satisfied moguls patting themselves on the back for putting broke students thru the wringer.

It’s much worse than that.

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Music Monday: Coulthard: Cello Sonata

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Coulthard steered clear of the cutting edge of the avant-garde, writing in a language that was often criticized for being conservative and out of touch (criticisms that often carried more than a whiff of misogyny in the background), but one that she felt called to all the same. (In her last works, she did experiment with various contemporary techniques, but they were never a core part of her repertoire.) Her cello sonata, written in 1947, very much exemplifies this style.

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