talking to old women about wind instruments

 The Jerusalem municipality is concerned with the plight of senior citizens (or whatever you want to call old people), so they gave a short course to a bunch of us in preparing talks to entertain each other. I decided to prepare a talk about wind instruments, essentially how and why musical instruments evolved from the pan pipe to the saxophone (not that the saxophone is the highest form of musical evolution, though some would make that claim).

Yesterday I got to give my talk for the first time at a club for what is kindly called "the third age" in the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood, and it went well enough, though I had to struggle with laryngitis. My audience consisted of about nineteen women and one man. Where do the old men go? 

I started by introducing myself and saying that for me wind instruments are special, because we power them with our breath, and we put them in our mouths - extremely intimate contact. In Hebrew, the word for the soul (neshama) is derived from the verb "to breathe" (linshom). You put your soul into a wind instrument. I mentioned that archaeologists have found bone pipes that are nearly 50,000 years old.

I brought a shopping cart full of instruments and demonstrated them briefly (too briefly): a pan pipe that my daughter brought from Peru, which I can't really play beyond getting a few notes about it; a bansuri (an Indian flute) that I bought from its maker in Mumbai, which I can sort of play; a modern Sankyo flute; a clarinet; and finally a soprano saxophone. I had kind of imagined lugging my baritone sax as well and posing the question, "How could both this monster and the slender soprano sax both be saxophones?" But I wasn't up to transporting the bari. I was also recovering from a cold and wasn't quite up to playing a lot.

What interests me, and what I tried to communicate, is how each instrument suits the music of its culture. The pan pipe is fine for the Indians of the Andes. The bansuri suits the subtle complexity of Indian music. But modern Western music demands instruments that can play in all twelve keys, plus a bunch of other things that I talked about, such as the improvement in metal working that made it possible to produce wind instruments in factories, the emergence of a public that went to concerts and bought instruments, the need for loud instruments in military bands, and so on. I also talked about the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. And I sort of explained that the sound of a wind instrument comes from a vibrating column of air, which is lengthened and shortened by opening and closing holes in the tube. 

I made a major mistake in planning the talk, however. I ought to have prepared a short piece to play on each of the instruments as I demonstrated them. I did play some stuff, but I should have paid more attention to that aspect of the talk.

Anyway, it was pretty well received, and I enjoyed myself.

O Solo Mio

When you play jazz, you're expected to be able to solo. When you have been trained as a classical musician, to read notes accurately, it's hard to trust to get free of the notes, a bit like swimming without water wings. 

Arnie Lawrence once told me an anecdote about Dizzy Gillespie. A radio interviewer once commented that, since Dizzy and his fellow musicians played without written notes, they must make a lot of mistakes. Dizzy just laughed.

On the one hand, it's true that if you play a song by ear, without the notes before your eyes, you're liable to make mistakes. That's why big bands, jazz orchestras, have written parts. But in jazz, it doesn't exactly matter whether you play the right notes, the way it matters whether a pianist performing a Beethoven concerto with a symphony orchestra had better play exactly what Beethoven wrote. The classical performer's interpretive freedom thrives on what Beethoven didn't write. The jazz performer's interpretive freedom is much greater, not that every jazz musician who takes a solo is as profound and creative as Beethoven (to state the obvious).

Fortunately for me, in the past couple of years I've been playing in an amateur big band, where the director encourages us to solo, even if we're not very good at it. This, by the way, is in contrast to the big band that I played in for about ten years, whose director only gave solos to the musicians in the band who were best at it, so the rest of us never had practice in soloing. 

I've been getting more confident in taking solos and enjoying the risk and creativity. I heard Sonny Rollins say in an interview that when he soloed in performances, he never knew exactly what he would play. Arnie Lawrence said that when you solo you have to play what God tells you to play. I'm lightyears behind Sonny and Arnie in musical ability, but I take inspiration from them. You have to play what comes to you on the spot.

When I solo, I don't have the chord progressions firmly in my ears. I have to look at the chord symbols to guide me and keep me in the right place. But I'm getting better at hearing the changes and listening to what the band's rhythm section is playing. I'm also getting better at hearing what other soloists do, both my fellow musicians in the band, and the great professionals I hear in recordings.

A Fine Young Violinist and a Shaggy Black Dog

For a couple of months we were planning to host a recital for Ivan Abedelmalak, but then Israel and Iran started firing missiles at each other, and we thought we would have to cancel the concert. Fortunately, the ceasefire ended this round of hostilities, so we went ahead with the recital.

Ivan is a Roman Catholic Palestinian from the Old City of Jerusalem who has been fostered by the prominent Israeli violinist, Robert Canetti since he was seven. Ivan played an ambitious program with well-deserved confidence, though when he's not holding his violin, he is a shy young man with a sweet, bashful smile.

Canetti and his wife Bella, an energetic musician and educator, have worked for years with young musicians from East Jerusalem. Ivan is far from their only success story.

We squeezed about twenty-five people into our dining room, and everyone was swept away by Ivan's performance. Strangely, our dog was responsible for the recital, and he lay quietly at Ivan's feet while he played, making his concentration ever more impressive.

The Canettis have two dogs, and I met Robert with his dog at the dog park near the Liberty Bell Garden. He's a modest man, and I didn't know that he was a great musician. Through Yaron, a high school teacher and dog walker, our dog connected with theirs, they mentioned the possibility of holding the concert to Yaron, and that's how it happened.

Many things can connect people, both dogs and enthusiasm for music. We feel privileged to have such fine musicians play for our friends in our house. We provide the venue and refreshments after the concert, the audience makes a contribution to the artist, and we are all enriched.

Music, Ironies, and Tragedies

 Before removing a crown, beneath which my tooth was decaying, my dentist asked me what music I'd like to hear during the process. At first I wanted to say I didn't care, but then I asked for string quartets. "Which ones?" he asked. I opted for Haydn. 

The quartet his program chose contained the beautiful tune that eventually became the German national anthem. How ironic, I thought. Music originally written by an Austrian court composer for a Hapsburg emperor before there were nation states in Europe became the anthem of an aggressive nationalist state (and remains the anthem of a liberal democratic state). 

However, irony isn't the right term, at least if you attribute an ironic intention to History, with a capital 'H.' History, an entity that only exists in human minds, cannot have intentions and clearly can't be ironic.

Music is composed and performed at specific historical moments, and we hear and play it at different historical moments. That's a truism that applies to every sort of art. Artists live human lives and undergo historical events. Biographies are written about them, often trying to link their works to the events of their lives, personal and historical. But those links are surely speculative at best, irrelevant to the deep pleasure we get from art and the meaning we find in it.

As for speculation, what if Schubert, Mozart, Schumann, and Mendelssohn has lived as long as Haydn? What wonderful music they would have given us, and how different the history Western classical music would have been. The early deaths of these important composers were tragic for the men themselves and their families and friends, but not because History was writing a tragedy. Perhaps we appreciate their music more, knowing that they died too young.

We listen to their music our historical vantage point and may be puzzled that German culture, which produced a regime so monstrously evil that it's become iconic, should also have produced such profound and brilliant musicians. We are stuck with our vantage point and its puzzles. Art, however, can raise us out of history and present us with its own puzzles.

Very Loud Speakers

Last night someone who lives near us had a party and treated the entire neighborhood to live music, amplified a horrendous level, so that in our house it was much louder than we ever turn up music we want to listen to. Not only was the music beyond loud, it was also beyond vulgar. I hated being subjected to that auditory invasion. It's illegal here to make noise louder than a certain decibel level, but I didn't call the police, because I'm sure it wouldn't have helped.

This abuse of sound systems is common in Israel, where I live, but I'm sure Israel isn't unique in this respect. I have attended weddings where the background music, as it were, was so loud you couldn't hold a conversation without shouting. Time and time again I have asked waiters to have the music turned down in restaurants. Sometimes it works. I have often attended concerts, not of classical music, where microphones were placed in pianos, even in small halls. Why? It spoils the sound of the piano, an instrument capable of flooding a vast auditorium with music. All the instruments in a jazz ensemble, except the guitar and bass, are naturally very loud. Why bother with microphones? At least string quartets aren't amplified. Perhaps that day will come.

Soundmen are all afflicted with megalomania. Or else by now they are all so deaf, because they have bombarded their own ears with so much noise that they can't hear unless they amplify music to the level of distortion.

A Performance

 I have been playing baritone saxophone in a big band for the last two or three years. We meet just once a week, and we're all amateurs, so we'll never get even near to the level of one of the run of the mill professional big bands of the swing era, let alone the great bands. We're probably not as good as a high school band with a good music program, let alone the bands of college music schools. But we have fun and gradually reach a decent level in a small repertoire of swing tunes.

Last night (May 25, 2025) we played in a community center with a pub for a large and enthusiastic audience, and the performance was a success. I practiced pretty hard over the week before the performance and was able to play without too many mistakes. I also worked on mastering the changes for the solos. I think I did all right. We paid someone to make a video of the performance, so I'll be able to hear myself soon enough. I hope I won't be disappointed.

I've been playing bari sax for more than thirty years, and I ought to be a lot better than I am at it. I bought my first instrument, from a musician in the police band who was retiring and couldn't play such a heavy instrument anymore. That was in the mid-1980s, I think. Before I bought that instrument (it was a Grassi, an Italian company), I had never even considered acquiring a baritone sax, but the price was low, and the man who sold it was very nice, so I went for it. I played it in a few ensembles. It wasn't a great instrument, and I wanted a better one. When my father died in the early 1990s, there was some cash in an account he left, so I splurged and bought an excellent Selmer saxophone and have been playing it since then. By now, both it and I are vintage!

In a way, owning a baritone saxophone is a little like being the one who owned the ball when we were choosing up sides in the park when I was a kid. If you owned the ball, you had to be included. Bands almost always need a baritone saxophone player. I played in a couple of community wind orchestras and pretty good big band for ten years, but I left when I reached the age of seventy. The rehearsals were late on Sunday nights, about a 45 minute drive from Jerusalem, and I would get home exhausted, not get enough sleep, and be off kilter for the rest of the week.

I had no intention of joining another big band, but a friend of mine invited me to a performance of a group he was playing in. They put on a good show and needed a bari player, so I joined. It's been fun. I'm the oldest guy in the band, and I always wonder how long I'll be able to keep at it. After I had a hip replacement, it was hard for me to handle the heavy instrument, and I measure my recuperation by how well I can manage it now.

Until I began playing in big bands, I prefered small jazz ensembles. But I've learned to love the music. Even our amateur band excited the audience, and when the audience is excited, the excitement flows back to the musicians. Being in the band and rehearsing the parts makes you aware of just how sophisticated the music is, more sophisticated, probably, than the audience realizes. 

I hope we get to play for an audience again soon.

Do Chords Exist?

 A central concept in music theory is voice-leading. For example, in the transition from a C major triad in the root position (C-E-G) to an F major triad in the second inversion (C-F-A) the voice-leading is obvious: the E moves up a minor second to F, and the G moves up a major second to A. The concept of voice-leading is valuable for understanding chord progressions and transpositions from key to key.

I have been learning Telemann flute duets, the six sonatas, TVW 40, which are essentially exercises in two-part counterpoint. There is plenty of voice-leading, as, for example, Telemann adds a G# to a run, leading to an A, and signalling that he has modulated from the key of D to the key of A. But I wonder whether Telemann was thinking in terms of what we now know as classical Western harmony.

There are plenty of arpeggios in these duets, spelling out chords, and they lead from one measure to the next, but I find myself wondering, as I play them, whether Telemann thought of them as chords. By contrast, if you look at the lead sheet of a jazz standard, you'll see a melody line, written in the treble clef, with the names of chords written above it. The musicians who play the piece use the chords as indications of how the melody should be accompanied and as the basis for improvisation. To fit the improvisation over the chord progression, or to play a walking bass line, you have to know what the notes of the chords are and what scale they suggest. Most of the time, this isn't an insuperable challenge. To take a slightly uncommon example, when you see a chord labelled C7#5, you have to understand that the chord notes are C-E-G#-Bb (=A#), which implies a whole tone scale: C-D-E-F#-G#-A#-C. My question is the following: is a C7#5 really a chord? Those four notes do not appear together in any ordinary diatonic scale. Similarly, a very common chord in jazz is written as a six, as in C6 (C-E-G-A), but it's really an A minor seventh in the first inversion. If it really is anything.

When did Western European composers begin to think of their music as based on progressions of chords? By the baroque period, composers were definitely thinking in terms of keys. The fourth Telemann sonata is clearly and intentionally in the key of b-minor, though one of the movements is in the relative major, D. But Telemann never stays for very long in the nominal key, and he uses voice-leading to move from key to key. A passage in F#7 is followed by a passage in b-minor, as classical harmony tells us that it should. But how did Telemann conceptualize it?

The name of a chord designates a certain collection of notes. A musicologist looking at a score sees an array of notes and labels it as a chord. In a sequence of chords, a chord progression, one chord leads to another. But the reason why the arrays of notes move forward is undeniably the voice-leading, the movement from the notes in one chord to those in the following chord.

In jazz harmony, people talk about tension - the tension created by a dissonance such as the minor second (or major seventh) between B and C in a C major 7 chord - and the release of tension in consonance. The tritone (augmented fourth or diminished fifth) in a dominant seventh chord (e.g. B and F in a G7 chord) is resolved into a major chord - in Western classical music, in rock and roll, in popular music, and in jazz.

That, dear readers, is a matter of voice leading, which underlies harmony.