a visit to the planet non-sequitur

This piece was written for Community MusicWorks in November 2018.

Where did the idea for Saturday’s Fellows Quartet concert come from? Practically speaking, it grew from a decision made earlier this year: my colleague Luke & I decided to organize two “fellows” programs this season, with CMW’s blessing. I’d design a small, intimate show in the winter, and he’d plan a quartet recital for the spring, in a larger, more traditional concert space. That’s how we ended up with a December 1st date in Jori Ketten’s beautiful gallery space at 159 Sutton St (7pm! Don’t miss it!).

How did we arrive at this odd mix of notes? Scandinavian folk tunes. Sacred music by a 12th-century mystic. A short, secular tune by a Medieval songster. An aphorism by a severe Hungarian modernist (“by” is a stretch – stay tuned). Four minutes of Mozart. Two minutes of Bach. What a mess! Why a mess?

I can’t say for sure, but my working hypothesis is that this mess came from two unrelated ideas. Two ideas that Ms. Young – my high school history teacher – would have called “Visits to the Planet Non-Sequitur.”

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First – it came from Schubert, even though there won’t be any Schubert on our program (the atmosphere’s nice on Non-Sequitur, eh?). There’s a moment toward the end of Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum** that I can’t get out of my head. It’s not particularly unusual or profound, really. Just a little expansion of an E Major arpeggio, slipped in between the singer’s final statements (“du fändest Ruhe dort / you’d find peace there”). It shouldn’t be much, but it breaks my heart – a world of regret, in three notes. An arpeggio can be a throwaway gesture – one extra, sugary flower on a wedding cake. Or it can make you cry.

***

Second – it came from a winter day in 2011, when I was thinking about quitting the violin. At the moment, I was preparing a Brahms sonata for a recital – the first one, the Regenlied, it’s a good one, take a listen – and conducting weekly Vibrato Wars, in which my teacher and I would argue about how many notes one should wiggle, and whether the wiggling should continue from note to note uninterrupted, and on and on and on. Did beauty come from the wiggling? What about meaning – did that come from the wiggling, too? I was pretty burnt out from the Vibrato Wars. I didn’t know how I wanted a violin to sound, but I knew it wasn’t the way I was being asked to play. My teacher was and is a brilliant musician, and I am full of admiration for her – but I just couldn’t realize the sounds she wanted from me, because I didn’t believe in them.

And then, entirely by chance, I pressed “play” on a short little iTunes preview, a 30-second clip from a recording by German violinist Isabelle Faust & Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, and everything changed. They played the opening notes of the Regenlied on an old-fashioned, 19th-century piano, and on simple strings made of gut. Here was a sound that had texture as well as color – it was flawed, and vulnerable, and pure. There was some vibrato – some wiggling – but not much. It was like someone telling a simple story, and telling it beautifully. The words were plain, but the delivery – the grain of the speaker’s voice… a pause here, a sigh there – couldn’t have been more subtle or powerful. That little clip gave me lots of hope, and I listened to it again and again and again, and I decided to keep playing the violin.

***

The pieces we’re going to share with you will be full of moments like that little gasp in Der Lindenbaum. They will lend themselves to that unvarnished sound – sweet and raw – that I first heard seven years ago.

You’ll hear most of Wood Works, a collection of traditional Scandinavian folk tunes, beautifully arranged by the Danish String Quartet. These are storied pieces that sound simultaneously plain and complex, ancient and contemporary, in the way that folk music often does. My favorite is the unassuming, slow Waltz after Lasse in Lyby – you can hear a clip of that on CMW’s Instagram, if you want a taste…

Throughout the night, we’ll drift in and out of the world of Wood Works, visiting disparate yet related voices from a millennia of musical history. You’ll hear a gorgeous transcription of O virtus Sapiente (“O power of Wisdom”), by the 12th-century visionary, Hildegard von Bingen. You’ll hear a lovely, lilting tune – Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure – by everyone’s favorite 14th-century celebrity, Guillaume de Machaut. And you’ll hear three of my favorite things…

One, an achingly sweet little melody from Bach’s keyboard Capriccio, BWV 992. If you’ve seen Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, you’ll recognize this – it’s Elio’s serenade to Oliver on a lazy, summer day.

Two, a magical Andante from one of Mozart’s Divertimenti for string instruments. This is the perfect example of Mozart’s magic, in my eyes. We start with a graceful, predictable dance, and it seems you know how it’ll play out. All it takes is a single chromatic inflection, though, to send us to the world of opera in miniature – as beautiful an arioso as you’ll ever hear… but don’t blink, or you’ll miss it.

Third, the conclusion of György Kurtág’s Officium breve in memoriam Andreœ Szervánsky. I worship Kurtág’s music – check out his orchestral masterpiece Stele/ΣΤΉΛΗ, if you’re new to his art – but the irony here is that the Officium breve’s concluding page isn’t even by Kurtág. Rather, it’s a quotation from a string orchestra piece by Szervánsky, the Hungarian composer memorialized herein. The Kurtág/Szervánsky wasn’t included on the Voyager Golden Record (it hadn’t been written yet…), but I like to imagine that it was. I picture that tiny minute of music hurtling through space, a kind of “Interstellar Call.” It has all of the magic of Beethoven’s Cavatina, in twelve measures.

So, join us on Saturday night for a visit to the Planet Non-Sequitur. There’ll be some good tunes waiting to greet you.

Written on Skin: Leoš Janáček’s Intimate Letters

This piece was written for Community MusicWorks in March 2018.

Several months ago, I wrote for this blog about Aaron Copland’s violin sonata. My affection for that piece was uncomplicated. Every layer of meaning – biography, reception history, extramusical associations – made it richer, easier to love. Now, preparing for this weekend’s concerts at Everett Stage & Bell Street Chapel, I find myself in the opposite position. The deeper we delve into Leoš Janáček’s Intimate Letters, the more ambivalent I feel. What do you do when the circumstances surrounding a piece of music push you away, rather than draw you in?
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When I put bow to string and try to come to terms with the physical demands of this music, I quickly fall under its spell. Everything about it is unique.

The melodies. Little cells, packed with emotional energy and ready to combine, break apart, metamorphose. They have density of meaning, like Wagnerian leitmotif, but also a plainspoken quality – they burrow into your memory and haunt for days on end. Janáček spent the better part of his career trying to enshrine the Czech language in musical prose, and you can hear that effort. It’s easy to imagine words standing behind every note.

The rhythm. For most of Intimate Letters, one or more of the four players is busy shredding some frenzied, repeating pattern (in musical lingo, we call such repetition “ostinato”). Every so often, those ostinatos will converge – or clash – to dizzying effect. It’s a cliche to say that a work of small-scale chamber music is “symphonic in scope,” but in this case it rings true. The force of this combined rhythmic energy can be overwhelming. A cataclysm for four players – as written on the page, it’s almost too much to realize. Too much for a little box of wood, strung with steel or gut.

The texture. People often talk about “color” in concert music, whether in reference to the harmonic language of Ravel or Debussy, full of sensory appeal,  or the orchestration of Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov, rife with surprise. Janáček is one of the few composers who makes me feel texture just as strongly as color. A melody blurred by a rasping “ponticello” – the bow pulled against surface of the bridge – is it a memory of something precious past, or a portent of some idyllic future? A note so unexpected and poignant that you want to delay the vibrato or press the bow – things our teachers tell us not to do – because that’s what it sounds like when a singer’s voice aches, when music is spoken rather than sung. Sweetness tempered with grit. Beautiful and ugly sounds rendered in the same instant. That’s what I mean by texture.

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But when I think about this piece, my relationship to it sours. Lately, I keep having the same experience, or variations of it. I’ll be humming one of its tunes, setting up the office for teaching… in the pause before the melody’s repeat, my brain will offer the same nagging reminder: remember what this music meant to the composer. Remember the ugliness behind those notes…

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“Oh, it’s a work as if carved out of living flesh. I think I won’t write a more profound and truer one.”

Leoš Janáček intended this piece as a musical portrait of his decade-long, one-sided, imagined love affair with a distant woman, Kamila Stösslová. Kamila was nearly forty years younger than Janáček himself, and a complete stranger. The two met briefly in 1917, while Janáček was on vacation. She was married, and did not return his interest in the slightest… but over the next ten years he penned hundreds – hundreds! – of letters, in which he poured out his soul, proclaimed his ardor, and declared her to be his muse.

When Janáček created this second string quartet – in a frenzy of creative energy, exactly ninety years ago – he was enshrining this private history in music, immortalizing it.  At first, he considered treating the piece as a public declaration, by giving it an explicit title: Love Letters. A friend talked him down from the ledge – that’s how we ended up with the more elusive Intimate Letters. In contemporaneous writing to Kamila, Janáček pointed to particular scenes in the quartet as pictures of their imagined life together – one movement a depiction of the son they would have had; another a portrayal of the composer conquering all obstacles to their union (“the ground shook”). You can’t make this stuff up! Well, I guess Janáček could, but… the saying still holds!

We’ve all had unrequited loves. We’ve all preferred the contours of fantasy to the disappointments of everyday life. But to invest so much of your life’s meaning in another, indifferent person – that seems like such a sadness! I cringe when this piece is discussed as some sort of hyper-romantic gesture. This isn’t love. That requires two real, flawed people. Kamila isn’t present in these pages – only Janáček’s picture of her. His fetishized, idealized woman.

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And for me, that’s the catch, the entry point to this bizarre artwork, only briefly visible. When I think about enigmatic Kamila… then I think about men chasing women who don’t want them. And I don’t want to hear any more. But if I acknowledge that only one personality is truly enshrined in this music – Leoš Janáček himself, and all of his desires – then I can begin to accept it as sympathetic, flawed, and deeply moving.

Is This the One About the Pilot? (Working Toward Copland's Violin Sonata)

This piece was written for Community MusicWorks in November 2017.

I heard about Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano years before I actually heard Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. The initial encounter looms large in my memory and — come to think of it — stands in opposition to my current experience of the piece. Tension can often be generative, as we say at CMW, so perhaps this story will be of some interest for those folks planning to attend our Sonata Series performance at the RISD Museum (Thursday, November 16 at 7pm in the Grand Gallery).

***
In 2004, pianist Karl Paulnack gave a welcome address to the parents of incoming students at Boston Conservatory. Seeking to reassure a presumably anxious crowd about the viability of their children’s chosen career path (read: financial ruin?), Paulnack shared stories about music’s healing powers, its necessity in our society, and the potential nobility of a life spent in its service. One of those anecdotes centered around Paulnack’s own performance of – you guessed it – the Copland violin sonata. This story is better in Paulnack’s telling, but I’ll briefly summarize it here.

During this performance of the Copland (let’s set the stage, actually: during the elegiac slow movement, at a small-town nursing home) a World War II veteran in the audience was clearly overcome with emotion. Later in the concert, Paulnack shared more details about the piece, including the story of its dedication to Harry Dunham, a pilot killed in battle during World War II and a close friend of Copland’s. At this point, the veteran in the audience stood up and left. He later told Paulnack that he was in shock – Copland’s music had triggered a vivid remembrance of a near-identical experience from his own wartime service, a particular trauma he hadn’t thought of in years. The veteran wanted to know how this was possible. How could Copland’s music make him remember so vividly, even though he hadn’t known about that particular connection when he first listened to the piece?

Paulnack’s story is a beautiful testament to music’s communicative powers. It’s also some heavy interpretative baggage for a performer to assimilate. From then on, I remembered the Copland sonata as the World War II piece that, by virtue of its somber American-ness, went straight to the heart.

And I’m not alone. To quote a random YouTube commenter:

“Is this the one about the pilot shot down in WWII?”

***
Now, when I play this piece, I have more information to draw on, and it makes things more complicated for me as a performer. New perspectives nudge that simple origin story out of my head, or at least force it to share space. Here’s a taste of that stew.

The ink was dry – the piece was finished – when Copland learned of Lieutenant Harry H. Dunham’s death, at which point he added the dedication. We have no way of knowing what he was thinking about while he was writing the violin sonata. It is a wartime piece because it was written during the war, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is a piece about war, or a piece about Dunham. It’s entirely possible that Copland didn’t think about the war – or his friend – at all while he was committing these notes to paper.

We know only what (little) Copland chose to share about it, namely: “I had little desire to compose a dissonant or virtuosic work, or one that incorporated folk materials. Nevertheless, certain qualities of the American folk tune had become part of my natural style of composing, and they are echoed in the Sonata.” Nicely put, Aaron.

We also know that the premiere drew polarized responses from critics. One damned its “rearward vision” (ouch!), while another (Copland’s friend Virgil Thomson) praised its “calm elevation… irresistibly touching.” That’s more like it. Wouldn’t we all like to be praised for our “calm elevation?”

I also know what my teachers have shared about their experience with this piece, and what various smart people have written. My mentor in graduate school was fascinated by Copland’s habit of spreading common, everyday chords across wide spans on an instrument’s range (think of a pianist playing high and low notes at the same time) – the harmony might be utterly familiar, but its presentation is unearthly. It creates the illusion of space, of solitude… of frontiers. Stan Kleppinger, in the journal of the Society for Music Theory, suggests that this piece’s special sonorities can be explained as dualities, moments when two key areas exist simultaneously – the magic lies in the ambiguity. Other scholars hear past the melodic inflections in Copland’s writing (and the related, pesky question of American-ness, which seems to dominate all conversations of this composer’s music) toward a neoclassical reading, in which canons and miniature fugues dance in 20th-century dress. Bach in Hollywood in 1943.

***
And even though the dedication was added after the piece’s completion, I can’t help but also wonder about this man, this Harry Dunham. It turns out that we know a bit about him, too, largely thanks to the work of Copland-scholar Howard Pollack.

We know that Dunham was incredibly handsome (in composer David Diamond’s words: “the most adorable, good-looking boy”), the darling of a New York arts community that starred Copland, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, John Latouche, and other familiar figures. We know that he came from money, that he graduated from Princeton, that he made films. We know he was, to some degree, a leftist. We know that he married a woman, Marian Chase, but we also know that he was romantically involved with several men in the artistic circles he moved in. We know that Dunham, Bowles, and Copland traveled together in Morocco. We know that he died in battle in 1943, and that Aaron Copland dedicated this stunning piece of music to his memory.

I wasn’t expecting Dunham’s story to be so rich. The anonymous “pilot” from my initial encounter with the Copland violin sonata has a lot in common with me, and with people I’ve known. His sexuality, his artistic and political leanings, his social circles – they all run contrary to the military stereotype that I conjured up upon first hearing. This speaks to my prejudices, but it also speaks to the simple fact that people are complicated. In fact, Dunham’s surprises form a nice parallel with the rich ironies of Copland’s own story. Copland, the man whose music was appropriated for “Beef! It’s What’s for Dinner!” or Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America!” was, in Alex Ross’ words, “a gay leftist of Russian-Jewish extraction.” The man who created an American identity in concert music wasn’t always particularly welcome in his own country. Chew on that for a moment. These are not new ironies, but they never cease to amaze.

***

So, in the end, what should a performer make of these accumulated, sometimes contradictory meanings and associations? Perhaps it’s a cop-out, but here’s an attempt. I’m not a historian and I’m not a theorist and I’m not a veteran, but I do know what this piece makes me feel. Now, as I type this, I think of the piece’s opening, and its particular magic: a series of plain-spoken piano chords; hanging in the air, unresolved, still. Just the thought of those chords makes me verklempt. They’re 100% Copland, and they just break your heart.

I imagine Copland’s dedication to Dunham as a monument to an individual life, yes, but also a way of life: a group of friends, and a particular moment in time and space. In the composer’s words:

“By reflecting the time in which one lives, the creative artist gives substance and meaning to life as we live it. Life seems so transitory! It is very attractive to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way we feel, so that when it’s all gone, people will be able to go to our art works to see what it was like to be alive in our time and place — twentieth-century America.”

I love that little word: our. You get the sense that Copland’s our was broad as can be. “Our” twentieth-century America was gay and Jewish and left, just as much as it was the opposite of those things.

***

For me, this is the fun of performing. You live inside of a piece, soak up its contradictions and cliches, and try to make sense of it – both the thing itself (whatever that means, God help us) – and your relationship to it. Each realization of a piece, each usage in a different context, is a fleeting act – but over time it forms a discourse, a discussion across decades. It’s a beautiful mess, but that’s where the meaning is. A generative tension.

In any case. I hope you’ll join Eliko, Sebastian and I for Thursday’s program at the RISD Museum. It’ll be a pleasure to explore this piece, in all of its contradictions. In so doing, I hope we’ll celebrate Aaron Copland’s life — Harry Dunham’s, too.

Further reading & works quoted above

Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Henry Holt, 1999.
Karl Paulnack, welcome address at The Boston Conservatory, 2004. Accessible here.
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland Since 1943. St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Gail Levin and Judith Tick, Aaron Copland’s America. Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000.

"a very humble goal"

To start: someone else’s thought. A very beautiful thought, from the phenomenal Moldovan-Austrian violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja :

"Musicians are not on the stage to play all the notes... the concert is the place where one makes experiences, and the performer tries to take the audience into a magical world. I'm not on stage to prove my quality. I'm there just to tell my story. A very humble goal."

- Strings magazine, 04.2014

When I am nervous, or jealous, or tired, I remind myself of these words and think of PatKop’s example.