Robyn Sarah's music, late and soon

It is a luxury to read a memoir about music written by an excellent writer who happens to have spent the greater part of her life as a musician. There are musicians who can write well, but they often don't have the discipline (gained from experience) to write as clearly, cleanly, and lyrically as they would like to. That takes an additional lifetime of work, one that Robyn Sarah has managed to sandwich between her lives as a student musician and as an adult returning to serious study.

Robyn Sarah is a Canadian writer. She has won multiple awards for her poetry, has published collections of essays about poetry, published collections of short stories, and has served as a university professor and as an editor.

Sarah began her musical life in Montreal with piano lessons, and from the age of eleven to seventeen she had the great good fortune of studying with Philip Cohen, a teacher who intuitively understood Robyn's musical needs as well as her particuar method of thinking and learning. She briefly returned to lessons with Phil in early adulthood, but for logistical reasons didn't continue.

The memoir bounces back and forth in time, so I will freely do the same when writing about it (though with far less elegance).

Concurrent with her piano studies, Robyn begins playing clarinet in her school band. Energized by the musical life she finds playing with others, she becomes a good enough player to attend the Conservatory in Montreal, where she finds an excellent teacher, and plays well enough to be principal clarinetist in the orchestra. She falls deeply in love with music, but studies philosophy at the University. She also decides against a musical career path, and pursues a career as a writer.

Sarah only spends a few paragraphs in the memoir writing about her thirty-five-year life away from music. Her path back to music is unusually abrupt: she is asked to play clarinet at an event she is attending as a poet, and has very little time to get in any kind of playing shape. It is this event that gives her the idea to return to serious piano study, with the intention of preparing a recital for her sixtieth birthday, and writing about the proceess. A few years pass, and then she calls up her old teacher.

I love the first sentences of the memoir:

I WAS LATE FOR MY PIANO LESSON. THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATE.

During one of her lessons as a returning student, Phil Cohen matter-of-factly makes a comment about synesthesia that resonates with Robyn. Another comment about learning backwards makes her realize that backwards learning has played a great part in her life as a writer as well as her life as a musician.

After reading her descriptions of sensory experiences, I can relate to the "kind" of synesthesia her teacher noticed. My multi-sensory experiences do not correspond to the "normal" definitions of synesthesia. I certainly appreciate colors, but I do not equate them with numbers, letters, or pitches. My pitch memory, like Robyn's, is poor and fleeting, but, since returning to string playing in my thirties, and practicing deliberately for thirty years, I have built up a true kinetic association with what I hear, and what I want to hear. I find that I can physically realize the motion involved in an upcoming phrase of music while I am playing material that comes a few notes (or even measures) earlier. It is like being in two places at once: experiencing where I am, and knowing exactly where I am going.

I have always taught my students that musicians develop eyes that hear and ears that see, but I believe sensory swapping is far more complicated that that. There is probably an inborn component to color and number, letter, or pitch synesthesia, but I have found that other kinds of sensory swapping can be developed. Mine involves the senses of touch (in the present and the future), an inner sense of smell and even one of taste or flavor. When writing musical phrases I experience a sort of physicality of the mind, and it is natural for me to "hear" what it feels like to play a phrase on a given instrument. I think that this is the kind of sense integration that Phil Cohen was talking about when he mentioned synesthesia. I also think that the reason he taught Robyn Sarah the way he did is that he knew that she could intellectually and physically understand what he was teaching her.

The center (the core, the heart) of the memoir is the teaching personality of the sometimes enigmatic and always imaginative Phil Cohen. There are other teachers mentioned in the memoir. Some of them are formal teachers (including former students of Phil), some are friends who offer wisdom, and some have excellent pianos that she plays on (her childhood upright piano is the only instrument she owns). It is what Phil has to say about music and musical life that really resonates with me as both a practicing musician and as a teacher.

The title of the memoir might actually be a reflection on a "refrain" that Phil always comes back to.

Try to play in such a way as to put the future always in your hands.

The future creates the present. The future causes the present. Know where you're going--know where the music is going. Music is movement.

Robyn Sarah's young adventures with music present a 1960s Montreal rich with the latest in youth culture, where she and her circle of intellectual and musical friends were interested in harpsichord kits (she helped build a harpsichord), classical guitar, listening to the latest new discoveries in old music, and enjoying the best in 1960s pop music. With her return to piano study, we also get to see a twenty-first-century Montreal, where Robyn finds restaurants and other venues (including an adult care facility) with nice pianos to practice on. She spends a lot of her time going from one piano venue to the next, and gaining performance experience in exchange for dinner.

I wonder how many of the restaurant diners she played for might have read her work, and had no idea who it was playing Chopin for them.

We also get to spend two weeks with Robyn at an intensive piano camp, where she gets a taste of just how difficult is to maintain a love of music while, even though it is supposed to be a non-competitive experience, competing with pianists young enough to be her grandchildren.

I love this book because I am a discerning reader, a practicing musician, and a teacher. I also love it because I approach the creative work of writing music much like the way Robyn Sarah approaches her creative work as a poet. I recommend this book to anyone who participates in the "dance" of music as a student (particularly as an adult student), as a teacher, as an listener, or as a practicioner, professional or otherwise, who no longer has the luxury of studying with a teacher. And I would also recommend it to anyone who appreciates excellent writing, and to anyone interested in the mystery of the creative process. It is available from Biblioasis, amazon, and other places you buy books.

UPDATE: The book is now available as an audiobook (read by Robyn Sarah), and is available through this link.

This Was Toscanini

This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father, and Me by Samuel Antek and Lucy Antek Johnson Brown Books Publication Group, 2nd Edition; August 17, 2021 184 pages

This is a reissue of Samuel Antek's This Was Toscanini that was posthumously published in 1963. The 2021 second edition is clothed in a memoir written by Antek's daughter Lucy Antek Johnson, who offers a beautiful portrait of her father's life as a violinist in the NBC Symphony, the conductor of the New Jersey Symphony, and an excellent writer and keen observer of all things musical. Lucy Antek Johnson offers a beautiful prelude to the book, gives an introduction to each of Samuel Antek's chapters, and provides an excellent coda that follows the abrupt end (not an ending) to her father's book. Antek never finished the book because he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-nine, when his daughter was just twelve (in January of 1958).

I have read many memoirs that tell stories about life in the NBC Symphony, and I have heard countless stories about Toscanini (some, from second-hand experience, not terribly flattering; and some, from second-hand experience, lauditory). When the opportunity came up to get a review copy of this book to write about, I jumped at the chance.

The book arrived yesterday afternoon. It is beautifully printed on heavy paper, and is filled with beautiful photographs. I recoginized the candid in-rehearsal photographs of Toscanini taken by Robert Hupka from seeing them on the walls of my friend Anne's house. Anne got them from her father, Mischa Mischakoff, who was the concertmaster of the NBC Symphony, and one of Arturo Toscanini's closest associates.

This book is unusual. Samuel Antek does talk about Toscanini as a man, but only in the context of music. Antek's observations come from sitting in first violin section of the NBC Symphony from Christmas 1937 until April of 1954 (the entire run of Toscanini's association with the orchestra), being on tour with Toscanini in South America and in the United States, and being invited to Toscanini's house to discuss the Verdi Requiem, a piece Antek was preparing to conduct with the New Jersey Symphony.

The book is generously peppered with Toscanini's Italian outbursts (particularly Non mangiare le note! and Vergogna!), enhanced with stories told to Antek by Toscanini about working with Verdi, and specific discussions of dynamics, phrasing, balance, and articulation that make me want to pay more attention when I am practicing. Antek devotes an entire fascinating chapter to Toscanini's interpretation and preparation of Weber's Oberon Overture.

It seems that the "magic" of Toscanini was to strive tirelessly for his personal ideals in music making without ever compromising. He was extremely demanding of himself in his humble service to the music at hand, and to music in general. He demanded (by example and by direction) that the people he was making music with be dedicated to the details that he wanted to hear, and in doing so he could come off as emotionally volatile and even tyrannical. But despite all of the tantrums, the insults, the repetition, and the shaming (Vergogna), the musicians in the orchestra loved him, and became better musicians because of working with him.

After finishing the book (I think I read it in three sittings over the course of two days), I realized that most of the Toscanini stories I had heard over the years from musicians who did not know Toscanini personally must have come from the first 1963 edition of This Was Toscanini. I'm so glad that Lucy Antek Johnson has expanded, contextualized, and illustrated this beautifully written portrait of a singular man and an extraordinary time in American musical history.

Times have indeed changed. But just because this document comes from a period in American musical life when big city professional orchestras were "manned" mostly by male players and conductors (some who behaved in ways that are intolerable today), this book should not be ignored by people striving for a more equitable musical future. It is a beautifully written and beautifully produced document that offers us a glimpse into a golden age in American music making.

Lucy Antek Johnson's coda includes a statement from George Szell, "Toscanini was a truth seeker. . . . There was before Toscanini and after Toscanini."

I'll end this post with a little taste of text taken from the chapter "Playing with Toscanini":

It was an arresting experience to sit on the stage facing him. His face was broad and muscular, its bone structure bold. Standing on the podium, he seemed almost tall. But I was someewhat surprised every time I spooke to him to realize how small he actually was. The most outstanding feature of his unusally handsome face was his eyes, which had a strange and enigmatic expression. Toscanini was, of course, very nearsighted, but in spite of this, on the podium, he never wore his glasses. When he had occasion to refer to the score, he brought it up to within an inch of his face, as thought smelling it, or bent down to the music on the stand. But though he seemingly had poor vision, he could spot the slightest bow movement of a bass player thirty feet away or the movement of a violinist at the back of the orchestra. The actual expression on his face closely resembled that of a blind person; his eyes had that vacant, staring quality of somehow not being focused. When he addressed himself to a section of the orchestra, he seemed to be looking through it, not at it. At times this puzzled the players, particularly when he lashed out at one of them with a venomous comment. We were never quite sure at whom he was looking, for his unfocused, angry stare seemed to be accusing us all.

I think that this book would make a great present to give to friends who are musicians, friends who love music, and maybe it would be a great present to give to yourself.

My Ramble on the The New Yorker's Survey of the "New-Music Landscape"

This week's The New Yorker includes a book review by Alex Ross that is identified in the table of contents as (oh how I remember the days when The New Yorker stood apart from all other magazines because it didn't have a table of contents) "Surveying the new-musical landscape." You can read it on page 81 of the magazine, or you can read it here. Oddly the link gives the title of the article as "the sounds of music in the twenty-first century," but what's in a title anyway, right?

The book review concerns Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Like Ross, I know Rutherford-Johnson from his blog "The Rambler". Rutherford-Johnson has a post on his blog about the book that includes a table of contents, a short summary, and a link to a bunch of glowing reviews. The book looks interesting, and I do plan to read it.

From reading his blog from time to time over the years, I know Rutherford-Johnson is interested in a lot of music that I know little about, and have found that he doesn't write much about music that I am interested in, which is fine. There is much to know in this musical world. The menu is vast, and there is only so much room in any reasonable human stomach during any meal to consume more than a fraction of its (table of) contents at a time. And there are many restaurants in many cities, and in many towns.

Alex Ross says that Rutherford-Johnson's book has changed the way he listens to music. Wow. No book has ever done that for me.

Making the transition from living musical life as a flute player to living musical life as a violist changed the way I listen to music. As a flutist, and even as a violinist, I would listen from the top (which is so often the tune) down. Once I started playing viola in ensembles, I could actively listen to the treble from a position in the middle and to the bass from above. Even the most familiar music sounded completely different, and it drastically increased the dimension of my experience. Composing changes the way I listen to music because I can't help noticing the way other composers (both past and present) use the same elements of music I use, but in vastly different ways. Practicing Bach and Haydn on the piano also changes the way I listen to music, as well as the experience of playing the viola part of a familiar orchestral piece for the first time. Actually, every time.

Ross has sprinkled his review with the names of many female as well as male composers in this piece, even stating parenthetically, "The suffocating maleness of music history is at an end, even if the news has yet to reach most big-league orchestras and opera houses." One of these days Ross might "step out" and make the same statement without the "cloak" of parentheses. Still, it's a big leap from the days of The Rest is Noise, which I wrote a post about back in 2007. He even spends several paragraphs quoting Susan McClary. Even though I have a very different "world view" from McClary (she is an academic, I am a practicing musician), I appreciate Ross making mention of her.

He quotes McClary in relation to Steve Reich's "Different Trains," (written one year before the time Rutherford-Johnson has for the beginning of his survey). Ross says "Different Trains" "typifies the late-twentieth-century return to fundamentals--what McClary describes as 'composing for people.'"

If composers didn't compose for people before, who (or what) were they composing for?

There is a contemporary trend that some careerist composers (i.e. composers who want to make a living from composing and seek out commissions and partnerships that will keep them involved the musical "economic food chain") use to their benefit. It's the notion that music should be immediately accessible to audiences. In order to be that way it should be programmatic, and draw upon subject matter that can be explained, so that it makes the listening experience "relatable." Unfortunately the people who get left out of this equation can be the musicians themselves.

When music is written in a way that does not allow for physical grace and instrumental resonance, it is not a joy to practice, rehearse, or play. When the purpose of a musical gesture of phrase does not involve the creativity of the musicians who will be playing it (either by recognizing where it is compelled to go by the way it is written or by having a handful of equally good choices to make) what is printed on the page is merely an arrangement of pitches, rhythms, articulations, and dynamics with programmatic directions.

The minimalist repetitions that hypnotize listeners can cause tension in musicians (either from the movement or from not knowing if you are counting the repetitions correctly). In some situations complex rhythms can create tension without the opportunity for physical release. When that happens, the physical tension gets transferred to the people who are listening, and nobody has a good time.

I guess you could take McClary's comment in reference to the era that followed the prominence of strict twelve-tone music. It could easily be said that in the second part of the 20th century a lot of strict twelve-tone music (and other serial music) was written for the enjoyment of the composers who wrote it. Twelve-tone music is a lot of fun to write, and while you are in twelve-tone limbo land, where dissonance is good ("dissonance good") and consonance is to be avoided ("consonance bad"), lots of unusual and pleasurable things can happen, particularly at the keyboard, where the uniform tempered scale helps with consistency. Once you have an ensemble made of instruments that are not tempered like the piano, and once you take away any sense of tonic or dominant, playing in tune becomes a problem. You need a lot of rehearsal time to have a successful and rewarding performance.

Composers who end up writing music that is a joy to play, a joy to rehearse, and a joy to hear, are usually composers who write music for the pleasure of the musicians who will be playing it. It is the way it has always been, and as long as people blow into tubes, hit things, sing, and either draw horsehair across strings or pluck them, I believe it is the way it always will be.

Four Centuries of Musical Instruments: The Marlowe A. Sigal Collection

Four Centuries of Musical Instruments
Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA
320 pages $69.99

When Marlowe A. Sigal was a teenager in Easton, Pennsylvania, he needed a tenor saxophone to join the high school band. His parents, who collected motorcycles, got him an 18-key Buescher Aristocrat tenor saxophone made in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1939. In 1960 Sigal's father gave him an out-of-commission Estey cottage organ (made in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1877) to restore, and in 1964 Marlowe Sigal started collecting harpsichords and pianos.

His collection of keyboard instrument grew. There are 8 harpsichords, 2 virginals, 2 spinets, 2 clavichords, 10 grand pianos, 11 upright pianos, 43 square pianos (!!!), 2 pipe organs, 4 practice keyboards, a desk piano, a lying harp piano, a keyboard carillon (think Die Zauberflöte), an awesome half round piano, a claviharpe (a cross between a piano and a harp), an orphica (a keyboard instrument held like a guitar), a dulictone, a bell piano (hammers strike metal bars), and a keyed monochord.

Sigal added wind instruments to the collection. There are 104 clarinets from various makers, beginning with his first metal Buescher "American Beauty" (1923). In the 1990s he added clarinets from the early 19th century (one of the early clarinets is a Grenser from 1807). Many are made from boxwood, and the instruments have a huge array of fingering systems and key configurations. The bores of the instruments also vary greatly. There is an American-made clarinet from 1865 made from ivory, and a plastic clarinet for children made around 1990 by Graham Lyons. There are bass clarinets, saxophones (14 of them, and even one with a slide), and 19th-century instruments that boggle the mind with their modern design.

The collection has all manner of double reeds: 52 oboes, 40 bassoons (with all their relatives) sarrusophones, a Rothphone, and even an intact rackett from the 18th century. Most interesting are two examples of "cup-mouthpiece" instruments: a bass horn and a Russian bassoon. I am, of course, extremely interested in Sigal's collection of 187 flute and whistle instruments, 132 of which are transverse flutes. The earliest transverse flute is a one-keyed ivory instrument from 1730, and the earliest recorders are from 1710. There is an 1818 glass flute from Paris, a Louis Lot from 1883, and dozens and dozens of instruments that I have never heard about before.

Marlowe's string instrument and percussion instrument collection is relatively small, but he does have a nice array that includes a pocket violin, a rebab, and a zither.

The book weighs close to six pounds, and aside from a few pages of text about the collection, a guide to abbreviations, a bibliography, a maker's index, and an index that organizes instruments by city and country of origin, it is a 300-page catalog filled with remarkable photographs of wonderful instruments. The collection is organized by instrument type, and each entry has a catalog number indicating when the instrument entered the collection. The book is beautifully bound, and the pages open completely, allowing the reader to see everything. There are some detail shots, and there are some instruments that have been photographed in their cases.

The collection is catalogued and organized by Albert R. Rice, who wrote the excellent introduction. I can't imagine any musician, any library, any school, any museum, or any collector who would not want to own this book!

You can visit the website here. There is a "look inside" feature, but the on-screen images are just shadows of the way they look on the page.

Strings Attached

Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations
by Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky
New York: Hyperion 324 Pages

This book is at once a portrait of the Kupchynsky family, a memoir about growing up and "coming of age" in New Jersey between the 1960s and the 1980s, and the story of a man who, deprived of a childhood, came to love music as a young adult, and gave his children and thousands of other children the opportunity to have music become a vital part of their lives.

Jerry Kupchynsky, or Mr. K., as he was called by his students, first fell in love with the sound of a violin at the age of 15. In 1946, at the age of 18, he came to America after having a very difficult life (to say the least) in the Ukraine, and went to study music (from scratch) with Roman Prydatkevitch, a fellow Ukrainian immigrant who taught at Murray State University in Kentucky. He studied violin and cello there, and then studied violin with Samuel Applebaum at Rutgers. He married a pianist who was also a choral conductor, and they had two children. Mr. K. made sure both of them began the violin as soon as they were big enough to play a quarter-sized instrument (in the pre-Suzuki days a 1/4 sized fiddle was the smallest one available). He gave his daughters lessons every evening after dinner.

Mr. K., who started teaching in a small orchestral program in East Brunswick, NJ in 1956, became the supervisor of music for the city in 1967. He conducted the orchestras in all the schools, and taught many of the string students privately. He gave tests to assess aptitude, and filled his students with a sense of "old-world" exoticism by yelling at them, and demoralizing them. But he balanced out his flights of temper with an overabundance of support and genuine affection. Such behavior from a school music teacher would never be tolerated in the 21st century.

Joanne Lipman studied viola with Mr. K., and she played in the East Brunswick school orchestras. She describes his conducting as erratic (at best), writes about his terrible sense of rhythm, and introduces him to us as the "meanest man" she ever met. There is no point where Melanie Kupchynsky, Jerry Kupchynsky's prodigious daughter, mentions the quality of her father's playing (which I imagine was never as high as her playing as a child). Both Joanne and Melanie describe Mr. K.'s method of teaching: he sat at the piano and forcefully encouraged his students (and daughters) to play the right notes in tune, and to play with good form and good technique. He took his daughters and his students through some rudimentary repertoire, and when they moved beyond his ability, he sent them to other teachers. His daughters went to Samuel Applebaum, and Joanne went to study viola with the ever gracious Paul Doktor.

Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky went to school together, and they played in a string quartet along with Melanie's younger sister Stephanie. After many years away from one another, they collaborated on this memoir. The two friends were opposites: Melanie was a star violinist at a young age, and Lipman, who loved music and wanted to play, was considered untalented by her parents. Mr. K. noticed her desire, intelligence, and will, and after she got a good score on his aptitude test, he decided she would make a good violist. He was right. She also became an excellent writer, and is now one of the editors of the Wall Street Journal. After spending time in the Pittsburgh Symphony, and after taking 19 auditions, Melanie Kupchynsky joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Both credit their success to having studied with Jerry Kupchynsky.

Some readers might take this book as an example of "tough love," and others might disagree loudly with Kupchynsky's teaching methods. My parents were more like Joanne's parents because they never insisted that I practice. I kind of envied my friends who had parents who did insist they practice, but my dedication to music came from within, and eventually I spent more time practicing than I probably should have. I find this look into the Kupchynsky household of the "spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child" mid 1960s at once fascinating and disturbing. The book offers an accurate account of a time of transition in public education and in culture in general (I was there and I remember). Some would say that it was a time of unregulated innocence, and some would say that it was a time of unregulated abuse and terror.

This is not a veneration, as so many portrait-memoirs are, and it is not a glimpse into a life of tremendous personal artistic accomplishment, talent, or genius. It is an honest and well-rounded picture of a person in the "trenches" (as some of us teaching music in the hinterlands refer to our task) of string teaching, where there is little in the way of glamour, but there is a lot of camaraderie, and there is a lot of hard work.

I imagine that Mr. K. will be compared with the "Tiger Mother," but Amy Chua wanted to give her daughters the kind of upbringing she had, and Jerry Kupchynsky wanted to give his daughters the kind of musical childhood he never had. He didn't have the example of a father (he grew up with a strong mother who kept her son from getting killed and saw that he made it through high school), and I doubt he had any kind teachers during what should have been his childhood. He served in the the Ukranian guerrilla army (fighting the Germans) as a teenager and in the U.S. Army in Korea early in his American experience, so Mr. Kupchynsky had models of military discipline to draw upon when attempting to get people to work together. And that's what he used with his students.

He made it clear to his daughters that he wanted them to be music teachers. He sent Melanie to the New England Conservatory where the music education students were treated as second class citizens. Melanie was a dutiful first-born daughter, and she wanted nothing more than to please her father, but she became a performance major. Stephanie was a rebellious second-born child, and she fought her father during every step of her adolescence, but she became a violin teacher when she grew up, and she used a far kinder and gentler method of teaching than the method her father used. The story of Stephanie is compelling. I will leave it to you to discover.

What attracts me most about Strings Attached is the quality of the writing, the organization of the book, the subject matter, and the honesty of the writers. Lipman and Kupchynsky alternate chapters, and they often tell the same story from different personal perspectives. This technique I usually associate with fiction works brilliantly here because it allows for an enticing mix of the subjective and objective. There is sure to be a lot of well-deserved discussion following the release of the book.

Strings Attached will be avialable on October 1, but you can pre-order it through Good Reads and Amazon.

Randolph Hokanson's With Head to the Music Bent: A Musician's Story

Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi introduced me to this book through a blog post, and I am sincerely grateful to have had the opportunity to read it. Not being from the American West Coast, I hadn't heard of Randolph Hokanson when I was growing up, but I certainly knew of two of his closest friends and teachers: Dame Myra Hess and Howard Ferguson.

I first encountered Ferguson's music a few months ago on a recording from a concert Hess played with violinist Isaac Stern on August 28, 1960 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh that was just issued by Testament (I just noticed that one of the quotes from reviewers on the website for this recording is from me!), and was overwhelmed by everything about the performance.

Hokanson had the great fortune to leave the state of Washington in 1936 (when he was 20), and become immersed in and embraced by the world of England's musical and literary intelligentsia (he met G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells at the same party). In this memoir he chronicles the highlights of his musical education, giving specific (and extraordinarily useful and insightful) examples from Myra Hess and Wilhelm Kempff about the what, how, and why of music.

He manages to condense 70 years of experience into less than 200 pages, and along the way he describes some of the artistic and geographical wonders of Europe, his impressions of what Germany felt like right before WWII (he attended a Furtwangler performance where Hitler was in the audience, surrounded by flags), and what it was like to tour for "Columbia Concerts," an organization that sent New York musicians (Hokanson was living in New York during the 1940s) on long trips to far away places to play concerts for very little take-home pay. Hokanson gives the rollicking details of one such concert in a place he calls "Nowhere," where a terribly out-of-tune piano was put on a "raked" stage (one that was sloped upwards towards the audience).

One of the photos (there are a few pages of photos) has Hokanson with his piano student Corey Cerovsek (who looks to be about nine years old). Now I understand one reason that Cerovsek's Beethoven Violin Sonatas are so spectacular.

Hokanson, who is now retired in Seattle, but is still paying, is a "music first" sort of person and an excellent writer. His memoir makes me long for the musical world of days gone by, when substance separated the competent from the committed, and accomplished musicians seemed to care more about their quest to understand the music they played than about the size and shape of their careers. But he makes it clear that the what, how, and why of music that will always matter, and that the quest to be come a "Beethoven player" is one that does take a lifetime, and one that makes a lifetime worthwhile.

The book is a print-on-demand book that is available through the University Bookstore in Seattle (1.800.335.7323).

I found this wonderful recording of the first movement of the Mozart A minor Piano Sonata, K. 310 on line. The playing says everything.

[N.B. Here's a link to more recordings, and a link to still more!]

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty
University of Rochester Press (Boydell and Brewer)
616 Pages
Available in October 2011
(You can pre-order the book here or here.)

Gunther Schuller's music has always been important to me. It was everywhere at Tanglewood during the summers of the 1970s (the place and time of my musical coming of age). I connect the sounds of Schuller's music (his brass music, in particular) with the mud, the tall trees, the lawns, and the creative musical activity and energy of the Berkshire Music Center. Gunther Schuller's presence also dominated the New England Conservatory, where I spent many of the evenings and weekends of my adolescence during the other three seasons of the year. I always wondered what lay behind Gunther Schuller's rather quiet and deliberate exterior. Now, after reading these 616 pages, I marvel at how a single person could fit what he did, saw, read, wrote, played, heard, knew, and knows into a single lifetime.

Autobiography is a flawed mode of expression. The tidal waves of suppressed memories that seem to overtake the sleepless octogenarian brain bring forth a wealth of unexamined circumstances that demand examination and consideration, but not by the octogenarian himself (who might have repressed many memories for good reasons). The task of interpretation is best left to analysts and biographers; making true sense of a life is not possible for the person who is living it. The amateur psychiatrist in me considers Schuller's overbearing and physically-abusive mother and his philandering father. I shudder when I think of almost-three-year-old Gunther being in the room while his mother was giving birth (at home) to her second child, and shake my head when Gunther is sent off to German boarding school alone (without his parents) on a week-long journey over the Atlantic, at the age of six.

Still, Gunther Schuller got what he describes (rather cinematically) as an excellent education. It was a time of long days filled with glorious natural, interpersonal, and educational experiences (though oddly not musical). Everything came to a halt when the Nazis took over the school in 1936, and Gunther was forced to become part of the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitlerjugend. After an accident with a Swiss army knife and a wire-wrapped Christmas present caused Gunther to lose an eye, his parents brought him back to New York and enrolled him in St. Thomas Choir School (which I presume exchanged the duties of professional singing for tuition). Gunther, who stayed at the school as long as he had a soprano voice (from 10-15), got an excellent musical education. In addition to singing what seems like the entire sacred choir literature, he learned to play the flute and the French horn, learned theory and harmony, edited the school newspaper, and began to compose seriously.

Gunther had to enter public school after his voice changed. He also did double-duty as a horn student at the Manhattan School of Music, and by the time he was 16 he had no use for high school. He was already several years ahead of his classmates because of his education in Germany and at St. Thomas, and was a good enough horn player to begin freelancing. How he managed to keep a full life of teenage activities (including playing in a high-school jazz band, exploring Long Island on bicycle, reading a great deal, and composing) and still found enough time to practice the horn and learn the whole orchestral and operatic repertoire is beyond the limits of my imagination.

The exact timeline of events is difficult to discern from the text. Schuller never really gives an exact age when he began playing the horn, but he does mention that it was a very natural experience for him to learn to play it. In 1943 (he was 18), after auditioning for openings in orchestras in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, and being offered all three jobs, he settled on a two-year appointment as the principal horn in Cincinnati. While playing the famous solo in the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, he spied Marjorie Black, the woman who turned would be the love of his life, sitting on the balcony (he tells the story very cinematically). Hundreds of pages of courtship (informed by thousands of pages of letters and diary entries from both Gunther and Margie) pass before the two of them eventually move to New York and finally get married. These diaries and letters make it possible for Schuller to recount what seems like every date, every movie, every concert, every walk in the park, every museum visit, and every concert experience. Eventually Schuller became the first horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where he remained through the 1950s. Composing and conducting gradually took over his life, and in 1963 Schuller stopped playing the horn.

The book includes detailed personal and professional analyses of many conductors Schuller worked under. I really appreciate the extensive candid critiques (some of them scathing) of Leopold Stokowski, Fritz Reiner, and George Szell, and the pages of praise for Pierre Monteux and Wilhelm Furtwängler (with whom he shared a train compartment during one of his many post-war European summers). He discusses the Darmstadt composers of the 1950s in great detail, and presents a lucid and accurate picture of the people and movements involved in 20th-century music on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gunther Schuller devotes a great deal of space to his musical and personal relationships with the musicians in New York's jazz world as well as in its opera, symphonic, and freelance world. I find it interesting that Schuller confesses to never feeling truly comfortable as an improvising musician. It was his superior ear (he could transcribe complicated scores from recordings--even 12-tone scores), his abilities as an arranger, and his flawless horn playing, that earned him the respect of his jazz colleagues. He demonstrated the importance of having a conductor, something his jazz colleagues eventually understood, and he contracted many of New York's stellar freelance musicians (i.e. classical musicians) to play in many successful jazz recording sessions. He was very close to Bill Evans, who used to come to his apartment to read four-hand transcriptions of the entire Wagner Ring (and Parsifal too). Charlie Parker, who was interested in the music of Bartok and Stravinsky, asked Schuller for lessons. Schuller writes in great detail about his relationships with, and influence upon, dozens important people in the jazz world.

Rather than being merely the person who coined the term "Third Stream," he was the cog in the wheel that made the whole thing work. Without someone like Gunther Schuller coming on the music scene exactly when and as he did, the paths of jazz and new classical music might never have crossed in a meaningful way. Certainly the dominant role that jazz plays in the music departments of universities around the world is, in a large part, due to the influence of Gunther Schuller.

The book is not without its flaws. There are times when Schuller repeats himself and re-introduces people and places. The timeline is confusing, and sometimes it takes a good ten pages (and they're big pages) for him to get to the matter that a chapter title suggests. There are long periods of travelogue, and long listings of films (how he had the time to see all those movies is a mystery) that prompt me to skim, but as a person who has accomplished more during his first 85 years (only 40 are represented in this first volume) than three or four musicians combined, he's entitled to a bit of fallibility.

This is an important book for anyone interested in the cultural life of the twentieth century, and for anyone interested in contemporary music. I'm looking forward to the next volume.

Eva Hoffman's Appassionata

I don't spend a great deal of time reading current fiction, and, with some exceptions, I find that most recent novels that have musicians as main characters tend to show a less-than-plausible musical life. It sometimes comes from a lack of musical understanding; an inability to maintain the necessary balance between the idealistic, romantic innocence and the pedantic drudgery that real musicians carry with them everywhere they go, and it sometimes comes from a musician-writer's lack of experience with using language to express what is more easily expressed through music.

Eva Hoffman, who has a deep understanding of music and a truly musical way of writing, explores many of the serious questions that musicians find themselves thinking about again and again. Without sounding precious or pretentious, she deals with musical subject matter (and other matters of subjectivity) in a plausible way. Her use of language is exceptionally beautiful, making the novel a joy to read.

Hoffman, a pianist herself, who abandoned her dream of being a professional musician when she left her native Poland at the age of 13, seems to have fashioned Isabel Merton, the main character of the novel, after an alternate version of herself, working out an idealized dream of life as a successful, intelligent, insightful and beautiful pianist (with a fine and understanding manager) who is recognized and respected internationally for the beauty and depth of her playing.

The novel, which is organized like a piece of music, in a kind of rondo form, perhaps, takes place during one of Isabel Merton's concert tours through Eastern and Western Europe. Isabel's travels from city to city are separated by transitions (Hoffman labels these transitions appropriately as "in between") and excerpts from her former teacher's freshly-published journal. Through a series of coincidences, Isabel meets Anzor, a highly passionate music lover from Chechnya, who manages to have business in many of the cities on Isabel's tour. Through a developing romantic relationship, Anzor introduces Isabel to a world of violence and extremism that she is not prepared to understand.

The presence of music is everywhere in the novel, even, at one point, in its absence. I enjoy the way Hoffman's omniscient narrator "transcribes" the random thoughts of characters as they listen to Isabel's concerts, and the narrator occasionally enters into Isabel's own stream of consciousness while she is playing.

It might be more difficult to end a novel than it is to end a piece of music. I found the novel's coda, which includes the reintroduction of a character named Marcel, who appeared for a short time near beginning of the novel (just before the first memory of Isabel's childhood) a bit heavy handed. The name of Proust comes up now and again in the novel, and Isabel refers to her childhood memories of shabbiness as "madeleines." The reappearance of Marcel makes the structure of the novel clear, but the way it calls attention to itself makes me think that the device of a coda works better in a piece of music than it does in a work of fiction.

Hoffman's coda moves Isabel into unfamiliar musical territory that Hoffman is not able to write about with the musical authority she holds during the rest of the novel, but for people without my particular sensitivity to these matters, I imagine the ending, which seems to echo the ending of In Search of Lost Time, would be quite satisfying.

Here's a review of Appassionata for NPR by Jessa Crispin that includes an excerpt from the novel, a link to the Other Press page that has another excerpt and more reviews. Here is a review of the book by Grace Andreacchi that came out after its 2008 UK release as Illuminations, and an online discussion about the book.

Here's a conversation with Eva Hoffman concerning her 1989 memoir Lost in Translation (and a transcription of it).

UPDATE: Post post reviews (both of these reviews reveal details of the plot):

Here's a June 26th review Claire Hopley wrote for the Washington Times, and a June 28th New York Times review by Sylvia Brownrigg.