Waking, I Always Waked You Awake, by Jean Garrigue

Waking, I always waked you awake
As always I fell from the ledge of your arms
Into the soft sand and silt of sleep
Permitted by you awake, with your arms firm.

Waking, always I waked immediately
To the face you were when I was off sleeping,
Ribboned with sea weed or running with deer
In a valentine country of swans in the door.

Waking, always waked to the tasting of dew
As if my sleep issued tears for its loving
Waking, always waked, swimming from foam
Breathing from mountains clad in a cloud.

As waking, always waked in the health of your eyes,
Curled your leaf hair, uncovered your hands,
Good morning like birds in an innocence
Wild as the Indies we ever first found.

The Vilcek Foundation Prizes 2008

Last night I attended the splendid annual award dinner for The Vilcek Foundation. Supporting the work of foreign-born artists and scientists who make significant contributions to society, the Vilcek awards stand in stark relief to the bellicose immigration debate that so inflames certain sectors of society, especially during this campaign season.

The 2008 winners were Inder Verma for biomedical science and composer, Osvaldo Golijov for the arts. Ellis Rubinstein, President and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences and Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School presented the awards. Dawn Upshaw, a musician closely associated with Golijov's music, gave moving and personal remarks. In his acceptance speech, Osvaldo observed that as an immigrant to America, he was able to come here to follow his own dreams, but that for so many who come here, it is for the dreams of their family and their children's future.

My sister, in fact, is foreign-born. Kelly was born in Korea and joined our family when she was three years old through a Holt adoption. Currently a transplant nurse with the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, her work literally saves lives everyday. I am immensely proud of what she does and the vital contribution she makes to her community.

The Divine Issa

Last night I completed my part of Issa's new recording project. The songs are moving and spending time around Issa always puts me in a remarkable state of mind.

Watch her web site for the release of the new material.

This picture below is of Issa and me after a performance at Carnegie Hall a couple years ago.

Sight and Sound

Because there are so few notes to play, the English horn part in Verdi's Falstaff offers plenty of time for sitting and listening. The first entrance is 20 minutes into the opera. It lasts for about two minutes and then there is nothing for an hour and a half (depending on tempi, rubato, etc.), which is not a bad thing in such a fascinating piece. Verdi's score overflows with delightful details. Some of these musical devices propel the story or comment on the action, many, on the other hand, are simply there for pleasure, both for the audience and the performers. Even after dozens of performances, I find new delights and relish familiar ones.

On Friday afternoon, my friend Joan Easton and I went through the Asian art galleries that overtook the Fuller Building for Asiaweek 2008. The 17th-century Indian miniatures in Francesca Galloway's gallery are breathtaking (you can see them until March 27, 2008). A small picture of a nilgai by a Mughal artist (c. 1610-12) captivated us. Joan, pointing out the array of intricate details in the background, imagined the pleasure the artist must have took in adding fanciful touches, a bird here, a branch there.

As I sat in the pit of the State Theater yesterday afternoon, with Falstaff going on all around me, I thought about the picture of the nilgai and Joan's comments. The musical pleasures were so delightfully complex as they danced throughout the orchestra, all I could think about was Verdi's pleasure in creating them. He must have thought about various musicians he knew, and those he never could, enjoying the aural spectacle he created.

Hooked on Bach

I attended the New York Philharmonic's St. Matthew Passion last night with Kurt Masur conducting.

James Taylor was a revelation in the key role of the Evangelist. His performance was a full of clarity, artistic commitment, and virtuosity used for expressive impact.

Thoughts from my teacher

Albert Fuller said at the first Helicon Symposium in 1985, that "these days we usually hear 18th-century music played on 19th-century instruments with 20th-century Russian technique, which is fine for the music of Stravinsky, but screws up the colors in Bach."

Thinking about Sound

Last night I played solo English horn for the opening of Verdi's Falstaff at the New York City Opera. The first entrance of the English horn is in Part 2 of Act I and is unusual for a Verdi Cor Anglais melody in that it's not sad. Most often in bel canto opera, when the lower member of the oboe family is hauled out, it's to intone the most heart-wrenching, soul-searching melodies. In this case things are quite different. The opera's four women have just been introduced—Alice Ford, Nannetta, Meg Page, and Mistress Quickly—when Alice and Meg discover that the love letters each received from Sir John read, save the salutations, verbatim. His wooing words and false ardor are painted in the orchestra with a somewhat loping English horn solo, dripping with feigned earnestness as it meanders down to the instrument's lowest range. The characteristic timbre of the English horn rising from the pit suggests serious business. Playing on those expectations, Verdi reveals the author's untrustworthy intentions with a joke of orchestration. The final note of the melody—a D below middle C—is out of the English horn's range, so that note is given to the clarinet. The sudden change of timbre on the very culmination of the melody makes the whole affair risible. As the letter becomes more ardent, the English horn follows suit with even more elaborate material, but the melody is ultimately maladroit and a bit bottom-heavy. (Consider the source.)

Last night before the performance, my friend Steve Hartman, who played principal clarinet, brought two instruments over to where I was warming up. One clarinet was pitched in B-flat and the other in A. He wanted to see which horn gave the best timbral effect in that passage. The experiment was great fun, and the result, I think, really hit the mark. (He used the B-flat clarinet.)

Thinking about sound and finding its invisible shades of meaning is a remarkable way to spend ones life. Verdi's music, full of imaginative propositions, can only come to life in the living breathing musicians lucky enough to be playing any given evening.

Rainy Day Views from Helicon's New Office

Ives Songs

I've been gorging on Ives songs. With their amalgamated styles and cultural admixtures, these songs represent the ravenous American search for a voice, equal parts old world & new world, optimism & naiveté, known & undiscovered.

This is how Ives closes the companion essay to his collected songs:

"Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the later ones, cannot be sung,—and if they could perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are,—that is, 'in the leaf,'—and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable. An excuse (if none of the above are good enough) for their existence, which suggests itself at this point, is that a song has a few rights the same as other ordinary citizens. If it feels like walking along the left hand side of the street—passing the door of physiology or sitting on the curb, why not let it? If it feels like kicking over an ash can, a poet's castle, or the prosodic law, will you stop it? Must it always be a polite triad, a 'breve gaudium,' a ribbon to match the voice? Should it not be free at times from the dominion of the thorax, the diaphragm, the ear and other points of interest? If it wants to beat around in the valley, to throw stones up the pyramids, or to sleep in the park, should it not have some immunity from a Nemesis, a Rameses, or a policeman? Should it not have a chance to sing to itself, if it can sing?—to enjoy itself, without making a bow, if it can't make a bow?—to swim around in any ocean, if it can swim, without having to swallow 'hook and bait' or being sunk by an operatic greyhound? If it happens to feel like trying to fly where humans cannot fly,—to sing what cannot be sung—to walk in a cave, on all fours,—or to tighten up its girth in blind hope and faith, and try to scale mountains that are not—Who shall stop it!

—In short, must a song
always be a song!"

Yankee Diva

How lovely to receive a comment from Joyce DiDonato last week for the Hugues Cuenod posting. Hughie is all uplift and inspiration. In my experience, it was simply impossible for anything feel impossible when around him, and certainly impossible to feel down.

I first encountered Joyce's singing while playing principal oboe in the Houston Grand Opera in 2004. For the HGO's 50th Anniversary Gala, she sang the finale from Rossini's La Cenerentola. She gave me such frissons that I could barely play my part. It was one of those performances by which others are judged—and usually found wanting.

Her blog—I've been a reader for some time—is great, so I am happy to add it to my links at the right. One of her posts this summer spoke to me so strongly that I have referenced it to friends as we've worked through the complications of Albert Fuller's death. In the face of the monumental losses experienced in the opera world last year, she wrote about the idea of carrying on the work of those who offered us our greatest inspiration.

" . . . it seems impossible to think of going forward without these great people among us, these immense presences in our lives. It almost seems perverse that we should still be able to hear and observe them in song after they've gone, but thank God we can. It makes me all the more grateful they gave so freely and willingly of their art so that we may have an eternal glimpse of their spirit here among us. And yet, it also amplifies for me how little we ever know about any artist that stands before us. How fragile, indeed."

The link in the text above is my addition, naturally. You can read the rest of Joyce's post here.

Carrying on in the face of loss will characterize our paths more and more with each step. As we go, we release our strongest, deepest memories into the world through our work, our music, and our lives, and in so doing experience the truest stuff of life in all its inscrutable wonder.

On the Wing of Tiny Bits of Sound

"Language is the psychic vessel that the invisible Argonauts we call internal objects use to travel from our mind to the Other, the outer world, in order to explore it and to interact with whatever they encounter in it.

This fact still fills me with wonderment: Images, thoughts, and affects can leave one’s mind and journey on the wing of tiny bits of sound. Even more wondrous, they can be sent into another mind, a mind that can “read” these thoughts, “feel” these affects, and register foreign fantasies and be changed by them without even being conscious of it. We are used to speaking and listening, so we take for granted the amazing fact that language links the minds and the hearts of two separate individuals and allows them to exchange meanings."

by Joseph Simo

From "On healing Eve's Grief" published in Psychoanalytic Review, 87(2), April 2000

Guest Appearances

I was happy to make a guest appearance on the web site of German organ virtuoso Ansgar Wallenhorst. He found my earlier posting about his New York recital in October and asked if he could add it to his site. His site seems very interesting . . . if my German were only a little better . . . or even existed.

Advice to young singers

From Hugues Cuenod as published in "With a Nimble Voice—Conversations with François Hudry" Translated by Albert Fuller (1999)

"I would say first of all to take music seriously and not try to advance too quickly. Then I would say not to make a recording before having matured at length in their roles. Above all, I believe it's necessary to acquire an extra-musical culture and to profit by having other activities of a refined nature. I always remember a young man in Copenhagen with whom I was working on Don Quichotte à Dulcinée of Ravel. A little while before the lesson I had gone to visit a museum where there is a beautiful canvas by Daumier depicting Don Quixote. I told this young man to go look at this picture for a half-hour so that he could understand why his interpretation was not satisfactory. He did, and sang much better at the following lesson. That's the kind of advice I like to give. Go to museums, read, don't restrict yourself by working only on music and your exercises. Take half your time for study and use the other half to see the world, to look at painting, to eat well. (I don't dare speak about the rest . . . ) All that is of the utmost importance for having a balanced and interesting life."

And then this for all of us, singers or not. Hudry observes to Hughie that "happiness seems to have been the principal companion of your life."

The singer's responds, "That's because I am content with little and turn to advantage all the tiresome things that happen to me. I remember uniquely the good moments of my life, and I believe that my existence could be summed up by a completely secular trinity: the gift of music, the gift of idleness, and the gift of being kind and agreeable with my friends. Voilà!"

Voilà, indeed.

Beauty and Bother

"Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently -- possibly almost invariably -- analytical and impersonal tests will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep."

----Charles Ives

Perfection & Music

"To excell in music, it is necessary to have an insatiable ambition, love and desire, to spare no pains and labour, and to have the courage to support all the discomforts which meet one in this kind of life . . . a noble obstinacy . . . which inspires us to perfect ourselves more and more."
—Joachim Quantz, Essay, Berlin, 1752

"Perfection in any skill cannot be attained unto without the waste of many yeares, much cost, and excessive labour and industrie."
—Robert Dowland (son of John Dowland), Varietie of Lute-lessons, London, 1610

"Perfection is death. I breath life into every note."
—attributed to Wanda Landowska by Albert Fuller

For Free!

Free is good, and at the Free Scores web site you can download pdfs of a large range of classical sheet music for free!

I've been using it for Helicon the last few seasons and just added a link to the side bar on the right.

Experience . . .

"Experience has taught me that powerful hands capable of performing whatever is most rapid and light are not always those which show to best advantage in tender and expressive pieces, and I declare in all good faith that I am more pleased with what moves me than with what astonishes me."

François Couperin, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, Paris, 1716

•

"And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth show,
and every herb that sips the dew,
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain."

Milton, Il Penseroso, 1633

Zéphyros Winds perform at Merkin Hall
19 February 2008
Tuesday afternoon @ 2 p.m.
129 West 67th Street
(212) 501-3303

Click here for web info.

Building on Merkin Hall's theme for the season, RE:invention, our program of Milhaud, Debussy, Britten, Szervánszky, Ligeti, and Janacek, explores the process of reinvention in six works for winds.

"Reinvention in Early 20th-Century Music for Winds"
by James Roe

The wind quintet had its quiet birth in 1803, with the publication of three works for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn by a now obscure Italian composer living in Paris, Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746-1825). At that time, chamber music for winds—called "harmoniemusik”—generally was written for an ensemble comprising pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons. The euphonious sound produced by these blended instrumental pairs became ubiquitous in aristocratic European courts from the mid-1700s until the 1830s. Wind ensembles were perfectly suited to entertaining at banquets and out of doors, their sound carried better than strings over the din of dishes and across vast lawns. Harmoniemusik repertoire included transcriptions of operas and symphonic works as well as original music by no lesser lights than Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart. The famous on-stage appearance of a becostumed wind octet in Mozart’s Don Giovanni perfectly underscores the ensemble’s cultural function, performing a transcription of the composer’s own “Non più andrai” from Le nozze di Figaro (along with music of Sarti and Soler) during the Don’s dinner. (Upon recognizing the Figaro aria, Leporello comments, "I know this one all too well!" Mozart’s self-referential jest reveals a post-modern wit, premature only by a few centuries . . . )

Whatever inspired Cambini to disentangle the customary harmoniemusik instrumental pairings in his three quintets is lost to history, but the new genre found fervent converts. Two 19th-century composers made significant contributions to its development: the Czech-born Parisian, Antoine Reicha (1770-1836) wrote over two dozen quintets, and under his influence, German, Franz Danzi (1763-1826) produced a body of nine. Yet, it was not until the 20th Century that the ensemble would gain sustained attention from composers and audiences. With the new century came a cultural hunger for the novel, the colorful, and the populist. The string quartet’s long reign as the preeminent vehicle for chamber music faced challenges from diverse instrumental groupings. Wind instruments, with their advancing technical brilliance and, especially, their distinct timbral variety, led the charge.

This afternoon’s program is drawn from the first half of the 20th Century, a period that comes the closest to being a “Golden Age” for the wind quintet. Our theme is that of musical reinvention. In each work, the composer reinvents historical raw materials, creating new music for winds.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)
La Cheminée du Roi René (1942)

Among the major artistic inventions of the 20th Century, cinema enjoys unchallenged pride of place. Our program opens with film music by Darius Milhaud. Cavalcade d’amour (1939) by French filmmaker, Raymond Bernard (1891-1977), explored the theme of love in three periods: the Middle Ages, the Romantic Era, and the 20th Century. La Cheminée du Roi René is drawn from the music for the first section. The music for the other eras was composed by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) and Roger Désormière (1898-1963), respectively.

The work’s title refers to the 15th-century court of King René of Provence (1409-1480). For his portion of the film score, Milhaud uses winds to evoke music from the time of the Troubadours and their songs of “courtly love.” This work reveals the composer at his most lyric and least mischievous; his characteristically pungent bi-tonality leaving no trace in this score. Each movement creates a specific scene with vividly picturesque music. Historic influences mix with the harmonies of early jazz (a major influence on Milhaud), and the spiky sonorities of French Modernism. This film score fragment reinvents ancient music, producing something that sounds both new and old at the same time.

"Pan & Syrinx"

There are two sides to every story. How often those sides divide down gender lines is matter for social scientists, not musicians, nevertheless we now present two musical treatments of the myth of Pan and Syrinx. In this case, Pan’s point of view (roughly that of the man, albeit half goat) is pleaded by the oboe via Benjamin Britten and that of Syrinx (the ill-fated but lovely female nymph), by Debussy and the flute. Since the story is by Ovid, there are neither winners nor losers, only metamorphosis. In this pair of works, the composers reinvent the mythological storyteller in the form of a solo woodwind player—a Greek vase painting come to life—and in so doing, each dabbles in Ovid’s transformative magic.

Endre Szervánszky (1911-1977)
Fúvósötös (1953)

Wind music did not take a foothold in Hungary until after World War II. Up to that time, the violin reigned in both concert and folk music. A government-imposed cultural shift mid-century favored less formal music making, and in response, Hungarian composers took up wind chamber music in great numbers.

The immensely appealing, Fúvósötös, or “Wind Quintet,” of Endre Szervánszky, was one of the first of its kind, and is an example of artistic achievement blossoming under oppressive edict. Influenced by the work of ethnomusicologist/composers Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945), this piece evokes a rustic musical landscape with melodies and harmonies inspired by Hungarian folk music. Szervánszky’s melodic writing is characterized by an accented short note on the beat, mimicking the stressed initial syllable in spoken Hungarian; a device common in music based on traditional Hungarian sources. Though he quotes no actual folk tunes, Szervánszky uses distinctive melodies, characteristic metric formulations, and driving rhythms to reinvent the music of the countryside on the concert stage.

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Six Bagatelles (1953)

''I am in a prison, one wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.'' ---György Ligeti

On June 12, 2006, the music world lost one of its most compelling and innovative voices when Eastern European composer, György Ligeti died in Vienna at the age of 83. With a career that began under Soviet oppression in post World War II Hungary, Ligeti earned a worldwide audience when his music was used for Stanley Kubrick's movie ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' in 1968. As Paul Griffiths wrote in his New York Times obituary, “The moon music was indicative of only one of [Ligeti’s] expressive modes. After fleeing Hungary in 1956, he also showed himself to be a master of a fast, mechanical and comic sort of music. Between these two poles -- the 'Clocks and Clouds' -- he created works of exuberant variety and range.”

Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet were written while he still was a young man in Budapest and combine, in his words, “Bartók with a little Stravinsky.” Originally composed in 1951 as part of an eleven-movement work for solo piano called Musica Ricercata, some of the music existed in an even earlier version, a Sonatina for piano four-hands. In 1953, the same year as Szervánszky published his Fúvósötös, Ligeti extracted six movements of the Musica Ricercata to orchestrate for winds. Through this reinvention of earlier work, Ligeti bestowed upon wind players a true masterpiece in miniature. Audiences today will hardly find this music shocking, but the Hungarian government banned its complete premier in 1956, citing musical ‘decadence’ counter to the good of the state. The work would only receive its first complete performance in Stockholm, 13 years after its composition.

Though the title suggests trifles—mere bagatelles—these six movements are diminutive in length only, most clock in at just over 60 seconds, and the longest is just over three minutes. As in the dances of a Baroque suite, each movement expresses a single musical ‘affect,’ and like any good distillation process, the result is intense and memorable. Moods range from playfulness to grief, contentment to craziness. Before one establishes itself, the next appears.

Jeos Janacek (1854-1928)
Mládí (1924)

Reinventing the self, the idea is as attractive as its reality elusive. In his late 60s, Czech composer, Leos Janacek experienced a creative flowering that carried him through the composition of several important operas and, between them, his most significant masterpieces of instrumental music. Among these late works is a sextet for a sui generis ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, and horn. Titled Mládí or “Youth,” this work was published after the composer’s 70th birthday. In fact, his most distinctive and forward-looking music was written during his last decade. As would be expected from its title, Mládí is infused with youthful effervescence and even naïveté. Musicologist Zdenek Skoumal writes, “Janacek recalled the days at the old Brno monastery where he received his early education. There he had been one of the ‘blueboys,’ boys dressed in the monastery’s blue uniforms. The recollections infuse Mládí’s musical content, from the childlike exuberance of the first movement, the monastic solemnity of the second, to the ‘March of the blueboys’ of the third, and the heroic optimism of the finale.”

Janacek kept himself abreast of the musical advances made by the younger avant-garde composers prominent in the 1920s. Though he was older than the last generation of Romantic composers, including Mahler, Wolf, and Strauss, his musical language sounds more modernist than that of his younger coevals. One distinct aspect of Janacek’s style developed from his “speech-melody” theory. Beginning in 1897, he engaged in field research to convert the irregular patterns of common speech into musical notation. The results of this work were immediately evident in his operas, where he sought a “realistic” setting of the text, leaving the orchestra with the work of creating the emotional sound world the singer occupied. This research also influenced his purely instrumental compositions. Mládí famously opens with a melodic realization of the phrase “Mládí, zlaté mládí!” (“Youth, golden youth!”) played by the oboe. Other elements of Janacek’s mature compositional style evident in this work include an expanded tonal palette that functions within 19th-century harmony, development through variation, repetition and accretion, Moravian folk-elements, and surprising rhythmic admixtures. His melodies tend toward the short and easily singable, often encompassing both a small range and duration. (In this aspect, he notably eschews the influence of Mahler and Strauss.) Rhythmic patterns receive idiosyncratic treatment, and sections of contrasting tempo abut without transition or warning.

At times, Janacek’s musical notation evinces conceptual effort, as if he struggled to notate on the page the music he heard in his imagination. Thus, the composer’s initial creative act of invention is left in the hands of musicians to reinvent through the act of live performance.

27 West 67th Street

For decades, 27 West 67th Street, the first door on your right, was a haven for classical musicians. An invitation to Albert Fuller's apartment was a special thing, it meant that you had arrived or at least were about to. I remember my first visit, while still in my first year at Juilliard. It changed me life. Now almost 20 years later, I find myself in the process of selling that apartment, as co-executor of Albert's estate. This space was home to Helicon for 21 years, the site for so many chamber music rehearsals and performances, vocal auditions, Juilliard coachings, movie shoots, weddings, dinners, and parties. (Oh, the parties!) And of course, it was Albert Fuller's home, and as such embodied, and in many ways continues to embody, the enthusiasm, energy, and promise he brought to generations of musicians and music lovers.

Last week a showing of the apartment coincided with a Helicon rehearsal for our Biber symposium. A bit of serendipity as it turns out. I was worried it might be a disruption, but our real estate brokers, the divine Sharon Baum and her brother David Enloe of the Corcoran Group, found it both charming and meaningful. The experience blossomed into an article in today's Real Estate section of the New York Times. (Click here for the article.) Thank you to Josh Barbanel for being pitch-perfect. (I imagine the article's opening sequence, which, in one sentence, goes from dirty laundry to hot milled cider to Heinrich von Biber has to be a journalistic first.)

Images from The 85th Symposium of
The Helicon Foundation
James Roe, Artistic Director
William A. Simon, President
Albert Fuller, Founder

The Mysterious World of Heinrich Biber
10 February 2008

Colin Jacobsen, violin
Robert Wolinsky, harpsichord & organ
Daniel Swenberg, lute & theorbo
Myron Lutzke, cello

Photographs by Joe Hsu