An Astonishing Cellist

 Last night my family and I attended a fantastic performance, the world premier of Gaia, by the French cellist, Gautier Capucon, at the San Francisco symphony hall. He commissioned works by sixteen composers on the theme of nature and the earth. He performed with an excellent pianist, Jerome Ducros, the composers of two of the pieces he played, and six cellists from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

The music was excellent. I especially enjoyed two pieces by Bryce Dessner.

All of us were impressed on every score: Capucon's brilliant musicianship, his openness to new music, his generosity toward the composers he commissioned, and his appearing with young musicians, who will certainly remember this performance as one of the high moments in their lives.

Young Musicians

In the summer of 2025, our California grandson, then thirteen years old, attended the Alameda It where he played viola and trombone in ensembles. He came home determined to play in an orchestra better than the one at his otherwise excellent middle school. On his own he found out about the Berkeley Youth Orchestra, made an audition video, and was accepted in the viola section. On a visit to his family in Alameda, I attended a rehearsal of the orchestra and was impressed by the way it was run. In addition to the conductor, Sam Wilde, a number of instructors sat in during the rehearsal and helped the musicians. Their comments were helpful and supportive.

Luckily for us, the orchestra gave a performance while we were visiting our family. They played well and sounded good. What pleased me, in addition to the music, was the seriousness of the young musicians. They clearly conveyed their conviction that they were doing something consequential that demanded concentration, preparation, and skill. How many opportunities do young people for that kind of seriousness?

Even if they give up music later in life, the experience of rehearsing regularly, of practicing in order to play decently, and performing is character building and offers a sense of accomplishment. It also introduces them to classical music. In general I was impressed by the music program at our grandchildren's elementary school in Alameda. How else would our grandson have ever begun to play viola?

Some Practicing Practices

Sorry, this entry is kind of technical. 

I don't like to read the exercises written by other people, so I make up my own or play scale and arpeggio patterns that I have memorized.

One of the exercises I made up is based on a run that appears in flute duets based on the Magic Flute, which Mozart himself wrote. In the duet, the run starts on an F in the middle register, goes down to a C, goes back up to the C an octave above that, comes down to G, moves up to A, and goes back down to E and then up to F. It then repeats that movement and after that it goes up in the major scale to high F. Taking that pattern, I start on low E on the flute and play through the pattern in the key of E. Then I move up chromatically, playing the pattern in key after key. To vary things I articulate the runs in different ways.

Another exercise helps me master the modes. I start on C and play the Lydian mode (sharp F). I then add flats in the order of the circle of fifths, each time playing a mode of C: F natural (Ionian) - Bb (Mixolydian) - Eb (Dorian) - Ab (Aeolian)- Db (Phrygian) - Gb (Locrian). As I lower the notes of the scale, I go through all the modes and notice how they are related to each other. After playing the Locrian mode, I lower the C to a B and I'm in the B Lydian mode. So on until I get back to C. Playing this exercise keeps me thinking. It gets tricky when you start in a mode with a lot of sharps or flats.

Another thing I often do is play a melody that I know pretty well, like "Pennies from Heaven," and play it in all 12 keys.

These exercises haven't turned me into a great musician, but they help my musical cognition while they make me move my fingers. It's a little like saying the same thing in different languages.

Going for Baroque

 I don't always listen to the baroque music that plays on my computer while I do something else, like writing an entry in this occasional blog. I enjoy the sound of baroque music, maybe because it doesn't always impose itself on the listener. 

I wonder how attentively it was listened to back in the times it was written. Did the courtiers who congregated where music was played, in salons, listen carefully, or did they converse, scheme, and flirt? A lot of baroque music is dance music, and dancers listen to music differently from the way an audience listens to music. And a lot of baroque music is church music. Today that music is performed in secular settings, and the audience listens to it differently from the way the congregation of a cathedral listened to it originally. They were expected to believe in the religious message of the music and to be inspired spiritually. We are also expected to be inspired spiritually, I supposes, but aesthetically, not theologically.

I play in a saxophone quartet. We have several arrangements of Bach. Often when we have played something by him, I have the feeling that my soul has been cleansed by the music.

Recently we hosted a dinner in our garden for friends of ours who recently got married. I played flute duets with a friend of mine while the guests were arriving. No one stood near us and listened attentively, which was fortunate, because I was making a lot of mistakes, and we had to stop here and there when we lost our way. The music was written by Devienne, a secondary classical composer, and after a while we got bored with it. Each of the six duets was pretty much more of the same - pleasant, but not terribly interesting. Recently we've been working on more challenging duets by Kuhlau, a generation later than Devienne, whose music is sometimes too interesting.

I prefer baroque and classical music to romantic music, in general, and I've discussed this preference with my fellow flurtist, who shares it. We both think there's too much ego in romantic music, not that we don't love Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert. Baroque and classical music is essentially about the music itself, not about the composer's angst.

Voice

 I recently read a novel whose content was not to my taste, but I liked the title: Voice Lessons. The idea is that the implied author of a book must have his or her own distinctive voice. This is a problem that I faced during my career as a translator, because the "voice" of the implied author must somehow represent the real author in the original language of the text.

I don't have a good singing voice. My range is limited, and I don't sing in tune very well. That's why I play instruments. Each instrument gives me a voice.

I have just returned from a twelve day dance seminar in northern Greece. I'm not a dancer - my wife is - but I enjoyed watching the dancing and listening to the traditional, local Greek music, played on folk instruments like the zorna, the lyra, the gaida (bagpipe), and the kaval, as well as on Western instruments like clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, and string bass. I took my clarinet on the trip, thinking there might be an opportunity to play with the local musicians, but the music they play is so different from the music that I play, there was no hope for me to join in.

Nevertheless, I did play clarinet almost every day, practicing long tones, a few scales and arpeggios, and some songs that I know by heart. I was a decent clarinet player during my teens, but I gave it up. I knew I could never reach the level of virtuosity expected of a clarinettist by contemporary composers, and I didn't like that music very much anyway (sour grapes). It was nice to get back to the sound of the clarinet, a voice I have largely neglected for a long time. I own a decent vintage Selmer USA clarinet, and it sounds pretty good.

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.