Phenomenal Talent

Last night, a cold, rainy winter night, my wife and I went to a small venue in a back alley in downtown Jerusalem to hear Simon Starr, a visiting Australian musician, who spoke some Hebrew, with two Israeli musicians, Omri Mor, the pianist, and Aviv Boneh Iddrissu, a young drummer. They played in what was once a half-underground cistern, left over from the time before there was a national water carrier. I don't think as many as a hundred people can fit into the place, which is a shame, because the performance last night was exhilarating.

About a month ago I heard Omri Mor play on a Friday afternoon in the same tiny auditorium in a tribute to the Moroccan-born Oud player, Nino Biton, a gruff old man. Omri was one of Nino's many students and joined them on the stage about halfway through the tribute, playing Andalusian music. Once Omri was at the keyboard, the music took off. His playing was brilliant, but he wasn't trying to outshine the others. He inspired them and raised them to a higher level.

I knew Omri back in the 1990s when he and I attended the workshops led by the late Arnie Lawrence. Omri was then a high school student, and I was (and still am) more than old enough to be his father. Even then Omri was such a good pianist that I wondered what he could possibly learn when he went on to study at the Jerusalem Academy. Since then I haven't followed his career closely, but I'm aware that he's gone on to develop an international career and played with major jazz musicians. I've heard him play here in Jerusalem on many occasions, including once in our home.

I was awed by Omri's raw talent when he was young, far eclipsing my bumbling efforts to play jazz. But it was a pleasure (and, in retrospect, an honor) to play with him. The music erased the discrepancy in age and talent.

Simon Starr played the double bass nicely, introduced his own compositions, and sang, but between Omri and the drummer, he was outclassed. The drummer, Aviv Boneh Iddrissu played as well as any drummer I have ever heard. He responded to Omri and Simon, he played absolutely perfectly, loud and soft, fast and slow, in many styles, as an accompanist and a soloist, and he's only sixteen! As much a prodigy as Omri was.

At the concert last night, he and Omri played an intense duet, improvising on Milestones, the tune by Miles Davis. It was breathtaking. There is nothing like live, improvised music when it's on such a high level.

A Successful House Concert

Last night an unusual trio played in our house for an audience of about thirty-five of our friends: Yinon Muallem, an Israeli who now lives in Sweden and plays oud and percussion, and sings; Saman Alias, a clarinetist from Iraqi Kurdistan, who also lives in Sweden now; and Dina Kitrossky, a versatile Israeli pianist. They played original compositions based on Middle Eastern music.

The audience's response was heartwarming. We are privileged to be able to host concerts in our home and enable the musicians to create an atmosphere of warmth and joy. We began hosting concerts in the 1990s when accomplished Russian musicians arrived in Israel and couldn't make a living, and we continued because it is so rewarding for us to provide a venue for fine musicians who appreciate the chance of playing for a small, intimate audience, even though they don't make as much money from such performances.

Recently we spent five days in Paris on our way home from California to Israel. One evening, in a restaurant we happened to go to, a jazz duo played: a guitarist and a bass. They were excellent musicians and played fairly traditional tunes. Both the fine food and the fine live music made me happier than I have been in a long time. A day or two later we went to a recital of cello sonatas in a huge theater near the Champs Elysées. Although both the cellist and the pianist were on the highest level, and the sonatas they played were fabulous, they were separated from the large and enthusiastic audience by being up on a stage, with the house lights off. 

Hearing live music is always a special experience, and hearing it in someone's living room, when you're not  separated from the musicians at all, is even more special.

More on Memorizing Music

 The course I signed up for is useful for a number of reasons.

Yesterday I wrote that the issues in memorizing is cognitive, but the course pointed out that there are two elements along with the cognitive: auditory and motor - remembering what you hear (or are supposed to hear) and remembering what it feels like to play what you're memorizing.

The main key to memorizing is playing with full awareness, or as close to full awareness as possible. Music offers so many features to notice, that perhaps only a musical genius can notice them all, and that might be the key to musical genius. Who knows? I find it uncanny that a mere child (prodigy) can play better than someone who has been studying for more years than the child has lived.

Practicing with an ear to memorizing what I'm playing has helped me, so far, after only two days, to practice better. Like most people, I imagine, I tend to gloss over difficulties and moving on to easy stuff instead of focusing on problems and solving them. If you intend to memorize what you're playing, you have to notice what's challenging and master the challenges.

Addressing my Weaknesses as a Musician

It's more enjoyable to keep doing the things you do well than to work on things you don't do so well. Recently I fell for an online course that promises to teach you how to memorize music easily and keep them stored in memory "forever" (when one is eighty years old, as I am, "forever" is not all that long). Not to worry, the cost of the course is less than a good dinner for two in a restaurant. Difficulties with memory are common as one ages, so maybe working on memorizing music will stave off general memory loss. Recently I read an interview with the brilliant Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt, who, without false modesty, described her own memory as prodigious, about finding her memory a bit less prodigious than it once was, and dealing with that development.

I'm not good at memorizing. For several months, on and off, I've been playing the bossa nova song, "Chega de Saudade," and trying unsuccessfully to memorize it. There are other songs that I once had by memory but have forgotten. For example, I often get stuck on the bridges of jazz standards, and I have found it impossible to memorize any of Bach's unaccompanied suite for flute. This is frustrating, and I'm hoping that the online course will help me overcome this weakness. I also hope that I'll be able to memorize the chords that accompany the melodies - the changes. That will help me improvise, another musical skill that I should improve.

This evening, for the first time, I started using the course, and I found the insights it offers into the process of memorization both intelligent and useful. Meanwhile, addressing the memorization weakness has led me to notice another big weakness in my musicianship, which is identifying intervals. I devised a little exercise to help me with that. Starting on any note, I played each interval going up: minor second, second, minor third, third, perfect fourth, augmented fourth, perfect fifth, etc. As I played I tried to anticipate the intervals in my mind's ear. When I got to the octave, I started doing the same thing, but going down. I found that a lot harder.

It's been easy for me to avoid dealing with these two weaknesses in my playing by being a fairly proficient reader, and I often spend practice sessions reading music. That helps me play the music with other people, but it doesn't help me overcome the two weaknesses I've mentioned. It does, of course, help with other weaknesses, such as intonation, rhythm, tone quality, and general mastery of one's instrument.

Importantly, musical weaknesses are not technical. They are cognitive. The lessons one learns in addressing weaknesses in one area of one's life ought to carry over into the rest of one's life. Let's hope.

Playing as Well as You Can - Far from Perfectly

 A while ago the New York Times ran a story about a woman who plays the euphonium, not an instrument that it's easy to make a career with. She decided to try out for the US Army Band, a good home for a professional musician, and she went through a demanding series of auditions before she was accepted. The story was actually about the way the army made her go through basic training, during which she didn't have a moment to touch her instrument, before she could actually join the band. I was less interested in that aspect of the story than in hearing about the intense scrutiny that her playing received during her auditions.

I've been playing recently in a band that aspires to be a big band, but falls far short, and, frankly, we're not very good. But we have fun. We almost never play for an audience, but, when we do, the pleasure we take in playing comes through. That's important. In fact, I joined the band because I went to one of their performances, and it was clear they were having a good time. It was also clear that the musicians were all giving it their best effort.

I've also been playing in a sax quartet for quite a few years. We play pretty decently, but we're not professionals. We only rehearse once a week, and we often have to cancel rehearsals because one of us can't make it. We don't play demanding music, but our repertoire is pretty varied. We have performed in schools, old-age homes, and even inmates in a mental hospital. It's rewarding for us to bring music to those audiences. We know that our audiences aren't the most discerning music lovers in the world, and they probably don't notice it when we make mistakes. But we try to play accurately and musically, to the best of our abilities, and the challenge of putting together an interesting program and performing it makes us better musicians.

With a friend of mine who is a very musical person and once played flute on a professional level, I have been playing duets for her mother, who is nearly 100 years old, physically weak but mentally on top of things. We read through duets, stopping when we get off, going back, working on them, not with the idea that we're performing, but that we're keeping the old lady company. We all enjoy it.

That's what music is for.

Does Harmony Really Exist?

 It's a truism, which also happens to be true, that Western music is characterized by polyphony, unlike classical Arabic music, for example. In Western music, since the Middle Ages, when people started singing in counterpoint in church services, melodies have been accompanied by other melodies, sung and played at the same time. Recently, with a friend of mine, another flautist, I have been reading through duets by Stamitz, a German baroque composer, a case in point. All there is to this music are the two melodic voices, which both answer to each other and blend together. Occasionally one or the other voices arpeggiates chords under the melody played by the other voice. But are they chords?

The question in my mind is: When did Western musical theorists and practicing musicians invent the concept of chords? When one studies Western music and classical harmony, chords are axiomatic. We learn chord progressions: one chord leads to another, from an initial statement of the key in which they piece is written, on and on, until the progression resolves by returning to the original key. When you know something about harmony, as you play the melodies in pieces like the Stamitz duets, you notice when he moves you from one key to another, and from one place to another in the chord progression underlying the piece. But medieval musicians didn't think in terms of chords. They thought in terms of modes, in which complex, interlocking melodies were performed. Later on baroque and classical composers added the idea of chords and chord progressions to their works: functional harmony.

Since we Westerners are accustomed to hearing to music based on functional harmony, we listen for it, even when it's not there. In the second half of the nineteenth century, composers like Wagner (about whom I don't know that much) and Debussy (about whom I know more) broke free of the functional harmony that underlay classical music, but their music still has a texture that the listener can relate to. However, theorists like Schoenberg sought to free music of the idea of the tonic, the idea that a certain note was the most important one, the center from which one departs and to which one returns. His music still makes us feel uncomfortable.

Jazz was originally a harmonic genre of music, not surprisingly, because a lot of it was played by ear, and our ears are accustomed to harmony. But increasingly jazz musicians have been straining against the restrictions of traditional harmony. Recently I've watched some videos that explain new conceptions of jazz harmony, the use of non-traditional scales and strange stacks of notes that they insist on giving names to, as if they were chords in the old-fashioned sense.

The basis of functional harmony is voice-leading. To put it very simply, a G7 chord, GBDF, resolves to a C major chord because the G stays the same, the B moves up to a C, and the D moves up to an E. Jazz musicians discovered that the two important notes in the G7 chord are the B and the F, known as a tritone, with a very unstable sound. They also noticed that the Db7 chord, Db-F-Ab, and Cb, contains the same tritone: F and Cb (=B). So you can substitute a Db7 for a G7, which is odd, because the Gb scale, to which the Db7 belongs, is quite distant from the key of C major. By using a Db7 instead of a G7, you make it possible to play notes that don't belong to the key of C major. This is just one of many innovative aspects of jazz harmony, and may also explain why many conservative listeners are not fond of modern jazz.

My takeaway is different. I find myself wondering why we insist on labeling groups of notes as chords (i.e., G major 7 sharp nine, sharp eleven), unless it's for the convenience of not spelling them out (G-B-D-F#-A#-C#) which is not to be sneezed at.

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Monteverdi and Shostakovich

Last night we saw the production of Monteverdi's pioneering opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, performed by Students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. The singing was, at least to my ear, on a professional operatic level, and it was accompanied by an excellent baroque orchestra. Forget about singing the demanding music. Just learning the text in Italian was a formidable task,

It's a puzzling opera, because almost all the characters are despicable. The final duet, a sublime piece of music, is sung by Nero, the cruel tyrant, and Poppea, who is little more than a sexy slut (to use politically incorrect language). I would like to know why this unsavory story of murder, betrayal, and lust was chosen for the opera - a subject for inquiry.

I was impressed by how well the students sang, with strong operatic voices, and acted their parts. A fantastic amount of hard work had to be invested in this demanding production. It could well be that some of the performers will never have the chance to sing in an opera again. The memory of this performance will be a high point in their lives. That's okay, better than okay. I found myself envying the young people who took part in the opera, wondering whether I could have attended a music conservatory, with my limited reserves of talent and motivation.

A few weeks ago we heard a string quartet composed of high school students perform a movement of a Shostakovich quartet. They played with depth that it's hard, perhaps unfair to demand of musicians that age. They're part of a program for talented high school students, designed to produce a generation of professionals, an aim I'm somewhat suspicious of. It seems to me that it will only create a tiny cohort of the very best and a large number of frustrated people, who might be unable to enjoy playing the way competitive swimmers get sick of doing laps. Though the ambition built into the program gives the students a strong incentive to excel.

The other night we heard another Shostakovich quartet performed by the Jerusalem String Quartet, one of the finest in the world. The performance was almost too intense to bear. Those four brilliant musicians were once just high school students. In their case the program worked.

After a double dose of Shostakovich, I decided to hear (I can't claim that I'm listening properly) all fifteen of his quartets on YouTube, played by the Borodin Quartet. As the music flows by, I'm astonished by its variety. Shostakovich wrote entirely sweet music interspersed with challenging, dissonant passages, seven and a half hours of sublime and fascinating music.