The Necessity of Art Work

Why should anyone read my poetry, when there is so much excellent poetry out there already? Why should anyone buy my painting, when there are so many brilliant paintings in the world already? Why should anyone listen to my music, etc. etc.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
True, some people are professional artists, and they continue to produce art because that's their profession, and, in some cases, they even make a living that way.
But most people, if they are artists at all, are aspiring, apprentice, or amateur, and, if they are professional, don't make their living from their art.
The only reason to produce art, to be engaged in art work, is because it's of vital importance to us, whether or not anyone else likes it, or whether or not we like it ourselves.
Recently I decided to publish a novel that I began writing in the 1980s: "Site Report," an Israeli novel: http://www.amazon.com/Site-Report-Jeffrey-M-Green/dp/1502300621.
The manuscript I produced back then was huge and ungainly, and I saw I had no chance of getting it published, so I shelved it. Then a few years later, I reread it and cut about 1/3 of it, but I still didn't have the heart to send it out to agents and face disappointment after Today I am lessdisappointment. A few years after that, I put the whole thing onto my hard disk (I began writing it before I had a computer, and then, when I had a computer, it was an Osborne, one of the first home computers marketed, which ran on CP/M, so I couldn't copy the diskettes over to a PC).
Years went by, and I kept fiddling with the MS, cutting it, revising it, and then forgetting about it. When I heard of the possibility of publishing it for free and having it available on Amazon, I decided to reread it and see whether it was worth publishing.
By that time, I barely remembered writing it, and I was very surprised at how decent it was, so I did publish it. But I didn't have the sense of necessity about it, the drive that had enabled me to write it in the first place. I let too much time go by. And I have changed too much.
The novel is, as I see it now, about a person (an American Jewish woman) whose life is more or less stalled. She is divorced and can't meet any man worth marrying. She has a good job, but not exactly one she is committed to. So she decides to take a Sabbatical year in Israel and study biblical archaeology. In Israel she meets all kinds of people who are committed to their paths in life (though all the paths are different), and most of these people try to recruit her: stay in Israel and be what I am.
When I wrote it, but to a lesser degree now, I saw living in Israel as a kind of mission that transcended personal ambition and self-interest. It's hard for me to see life in Israel that way today. The novel conveys what attracted me to Israel thirty years ago. I could never write a novel in a similar spirit today.

Discarding Ambition?

This year, as most people in the world are unlikely to know, is a Sabbatical year in the Land of Israel. The Torah says that every seven years all agricultural labor must cease, and whatever grows in fields, orchards, and vineyards can be picked by the poor.
Some scholars say that this impossible arrangement was actually observed during Second Temple times. Today the rabbinate has made the colossal error of reinstating the rule, only to find a way of getting around it.
I contend it was an error, because I imagine the rabbis could have said they had no idea when the cycle started and, consequently, couldn't determine which year was a Sabbatical year. But they attached great value to the fulfillment of a commandment, even if it was more or less impossible to do it right. So, from their point of view, it was not an error.
But I digress.
I have been studying the subject of the Sabbatical year with a group of adults at an unusual Israeli institution called Elul, a House of Study open to secular and religious men and women. At Elul we try to focus on the meaning of traditional texts for us in our lives, not in the sense of dictating details of Jewish law, but in the sense of implying values that we may or may not identify with.
In our discussion of the Sabbatical year, for which the Hebrew word is "shmita," from the verb "lishmot," meaning to drop, to let go, we have been discussing the ethical and spiritual value of abandoning things in our lives, to which we cling, the way property owners, according to the biblical law, had to forgo their crops, an aspect of their ownership. (If this smacks of Buddhism, let it smack!)
At Elul, as I said, we have been thinking and talking a lot about discarding, and I have just reached the age of seventy, an age when further acquisition doesn't make much sense - unless it is for the sake of my children and grandchildren.
To illustrate my attitude: our good china shows a good deal of attrition, but when my wife and I start thinking about spending another few hundred dollars to replace the broken and chipped plates, we say to ourselves - why bother? How long will we be using it? We've had most of it since we were married in 1970, we replaced some of it about 20 years ago, but what's the point of doing it again now?
Another seemingly unconnected thought that has been on my mind for a while is the matter of ambition. At this time, I happen to be translating a book by a very ambitious young man. Indeed, most of the work I do is for ambitious people who think their thoughts and words are so precious that they must be made available to the English speaking world. I'm not complaining. If no one was ambitious, no one would hire me.
I was once ambitious, I think. When I was young and thought I was very smart, I thought I wanted to be widely respected and influential, famous. I say, "I thought," because, as I look back at the decisions I made in my life, I see that I didn't really want to be famous, since I never strove for fame. I didn't have that drive. Fame never came to me, and I never sought it out. But I grew up with the idea that a person had to be ambitious, so I thought of myself as someone who hadn't lived up to expectations - whose expectations? Don't ask.
Ambition doesn't make a lot of sense when your seventy years old, and I'm not sure how much sense it ever makes. Success, recognition, should be thought of as a tool: if, say, as an artist, I gain recognition, then I can continue to be an artist. If I want to improve the world, I need to attain a certain status so that people will listen to me and do what I propose. But the status is instrumental, not essential.
Have I discarded ambition? I think I did so long ago and never noticed.
Just today I learned that an essay I entered in a creative non-fiction contest didn't even make it to the honorable mentions. I guess I care. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent $25 to enter the piece in the contest. But, when you come down to it, my satisfaction came from writing the piece, and if it isn't interesting enough to be published, so be it.

Flies in the Ointment

Is there a method of critical analysis that can explain and demonstrate why a work of art is great, or one that enables someone to distinguish between great art, good art, and mediocre art?
From high school through graduate school I attended many classes on works of literature, and, in my experience, the teachers always chose to teach works that were acknowledged to be excellent, or at least historically important. We never, so far as I can remember, took a bad story and picked it apart to show why it was bad. Nor were we ever given a poem to read, for example, and asked to judge it.
Much later in life I took courses in musicology, including a rather advanced method of musical analysis, which essentially showed that Mozart's sonatas followed certain harmonic rules, but which didn't show why they remain interesting musically after more than 200 years, while so much of the music of Mozart's contemporaries is never played.
Sometimes I think there is a kind of circularity at work. Certain people are trained as arbiters of taste, and they train acolytes, and these experts assert that certain art is good. Having made that assertion, one can rather easily dissect the work and point out the things one likes in it. Indeed, most likely these experts are right, though they can be blind to the excellencies of certain kinds of art, and there are matters of taste. I can acknowledge that Verdi's operas are great music, but I'm not on opera fan, and I don't enjoy them.
At the moment, an album of Clark Terry's, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," is playing and totally distracting me from writing. In addition to Terry on Trumpet, the other musicians are outstanding: Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. You could hardly think of five greater jazz musicians. But I don't know how I could persuade someone who doesn't like jazz that this music is beyond superb. What could I say? Just listen!
Obviously there's a matter of skill. You can hear that these musicians are masters of their instruments and that they play together with precision - but skill is no guarantee of artistic excellence.
What about the other direction: can MFA programs teach people how to become excellent artists? Or at least to become the best artists they can be? I admit to ignorance. I suspect that the answer is no, but I'm not well enough informed.
Food for thought in any event.

Fear of Playing Well?

My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say: Play great! You know what it sounds like, so play that way!
If it were only so easy, every musician (and artists of all kinds) would be great, and we're not.
Arnie wasn't dumb. He knew that. So what did he mean?
Once I brought my clarinet to his workshop, and he said, "Play like Barney Bigard," Duke Ellington's clarinet player. If I could have played like Barney Bigard, I would have been giving Arnie's workshops, not attending them.
My natural response to Arnie's manic encouragement was to shrink: Man, I can't play clarinet like Barney Bigard.
But my response was self-defeating.
Why tell myself that I could never be great? That I can never even come close to playing like a really great musician?
Why not say: That's the way I want to play, and, damn it, I'm going to go for that!
My new music guru - and I only use the term tongue in cheek, here and above - Raanan Eylon, who is teaching me how to play the flute, has been working with me for nearly two years on my sound, on getting a focused sound on the flute, and on vibrato. It takes a long time for a man my age to catch on.,
I didn't really have to put myself through the hard work I've been doing to meet Raanan's demands. I could have accepted the crummy sound I had figured out how to make by myself, with the help of some Youtube lessons, and let it be at that. But I said to myself, if I'm going to play the flute, I'm going to play it as well as I can. Otherwise, why go for it at all?
So I've gone back to the basics of long tones, scales, arpeggios - a long warmup before I even try to play music. It's had an amazing (good) effect on my saxophone playing, on my ear, and on my awareness of sound - a kind of remedial musical education. Better late than never, eh?
Recently, I've been coming much closer to producing a decent sound on the flute, and I realized that somewhere inside me there was actually fear of sounding too good. I don't know what that is about (or, maybe I do, but I'm not going to post that kind of thing on a blog).
Raanan has frequently said - and it's kind of astonishing that a man who could hardly be more different from Arnie Lawrence, should be saying many of the same kind of things - that when we play music, we are free to do and be what we are unable to do and be in ordinary, life. But you have to want that freedom and enjoy it.
In ordinary life, I'm not interested in impressing people, but I have to remember that when people listen to music, they want to be impressed. Why else would they listen to music, to say, "That wasn't so interesting"?

Paying for Punishment

No, I'm not a masochist, and I'm hard enough on myself in general, that I don't need to pay anyone to make things more painful.
I'm talking about my flute teacher, who is holding me to the highest of standards, even though we both know I'll never reach them.
Actually, my ceramics teacher is equally demanding, but in a warm and cordial way. She believes in encouraging her students with great enthusiasm for what they do, but she also won't let us be satisfied with a pot that's too thick or poorly trimmed.
My flute teacher is also encouraging, but not as much fun (in general men aren't as much fun as women). Sometimes I get pissed off at him (though I don't express it) for being so hard on my playing. But that's an immature reaction. What's the point of paying a teacher to tell me that everything is fine?
My progress in flute has been much slower than I expected, considering that I've been playing wind instruments all my life. Partly I lay it to my advanced age. A fairly talented kid who has been playing flute as long as I have would be way ahead of me, I think. But partly it's because my teacher won't let me be satisfied with less than the best I can do now, knowing that it's not good enough! Next week I must have a better best!
I still have no goal for my flute playing beyond flute playing. There are a million flautists around, and if I want to play in another orchestra, I'm in more demand as a baritone sax player than I would be as a flautist.
It's a bit analogous to what my teacher says about communication. He has told me more times than I can count (which doesn't mean that I've internalized the message) that vibrato is the key to expressive playing on the flute. Expressive of what? Not of anything specific: I feel sad because X. Music communicates itself, and whatever resonates in the musician when she plays and the listener when she hears is not communicated by the music but aroused by it.

A Reading Project

I downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and I have been making my way through them. I started with the Sonnets, which I had studied very thoroughly when I was a graduate student, and The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, which I'd never read.
As for the plays, I just finished reading Hamlet (for at least the twentieth time, I imagine), after going through some plays I never had read: As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. I had read the Comedy of Errors once and vaguely remembered it, and I read A Midsummer Night's Dream out of sequence, because a production of it appeared in Jerusalem this summer.
Except for As You Like It, I don't think anyone who read the other plays would imagine that Shakespeare could have produced a work of such high genius as Hamlet. Even though I was very familiar with it (not that I had read it very recently), I was bowled over by it, noticing things in it that I didn't remember at all.
The main thing I noticed this time was the change in Hamlet's character in the fifth and final act. His near brush with death on the ship, when he discovers that he is going to be executed as soon as he reaches England, and then his capture by pirates, which proves to be his rescue -- a far-fetched plot device typical of romances -- transforms and empowers him. We suddenly learn that he is a skilled fencer, he proudly calls himself "Hamlet the Dane," when he leaps into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, and he no longer feigns madness (of course one never knows how mad he really was).

Why have I undertaken this project?
Partly to enrich my English. After all, writing/translating is my profession, and I have to keep my English alive.
Partly out of a sense of self-respect. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and one of my fields was English literature of the Renaissance, and I haven't read all of the greatest English author of all. That's a failing that called for a remedy.
But mainly, because it's simply superb.
Even the bad plays, the ones that are mainly of historical interest, are full of glorious poetry. I've also been noticing the political dimensions of the plays, which I hadn't paid attention to before. I'm not reading any explanatory notes, and when I don't understand a passage, after wrestling with it for a while, I just go on. The occasional obscure bits don't interfere with understanding of the plays.

Excited Exhaustion

Some time after midnight last night I returned from the rehearsal of the big band where I have played baritone saxophone for the past ten years or more, and, as usual, I was too keyed up to go to sleep. I ate some cheese and crackers and read the newspaper till about a quarter to one. And even then I didn't fall asleep right away. When you play with a big band, you absorb energy.
I have to concentrate hard on the music to play it even close to right. I still find it challenging to master the parts and play them tight with the other musicians. My early musical training was in classical clarinet, and the rhythms of classical music, as they are written out, still are easier for me to play than jazz or Latin rhythms, as they are written out. You have to hear them and imitate them. (I believe that's because standard Western musical notation evolved with Western music, the way the Roman alphabet we use was invented by the Romans to write Latin, and it doesn't work all that well even with English, though we're so used to the anomalies we don't notice them.)
Our conductor, Eli Benacot is a fine musician, and playing in his band has been like taking a group music lesson every week. The baritone saxophone part in big bands is challenging, though they're not always technically difficult. Sometimes the baritone plays in rhythmical unison with the other four saxes, sometimes it plays with the trombones, usually the bass trombone, sometimes it plays with the string bass, and sometimes it plays on its own. So I have to know whom to listen to in every part of every piece, so I can play together with them.
Incidentally, when we perform, we often sit in an arrangement different from the one we rehearse in, and the band sounds different. Suddenly I can't hear the bass trombone very well. That's another challenge.
The music is exhilarating because the sound of the band is so intense, and the rhythms have so much drive. Last night we were practicing with our vocalist, Noa Anava, which calls for more sensitivity than we show when we're blasting out an arrangement by Gordon Goodwin. But even when we're playing behind a vocalist, where are moments when we have to roar. When it works, when the band plays tight and swings, there's nothing like it!

I Just (Self-)Published a Novel

The novel is called Site Report, and it's available on Amazon and a few other places. I began writing it 30 years ago.
I realized when I was finished with it that it was unpublishable: too long and on an unpalatable subject (Israel), so I forgot about it. Then, maybe 10 years ago, I rewrote it, cutting out about half of it and sharpening the language, but I didn't have the heart to go through the long process of trying to get it published. I have too much dreary experience with that process with my clients.
Then I heard about Create Space, the self-publishing possibility sponsored by Amazon. You can design and upload your book and have it available print on demand and as an ebook, for free. So I decided to try it out.
Obviously, part of the self-publishing process is rereading your book, which is something I didn't want to do in the worst way, so I waited another couple of years. But finally, I went through with it.
Astonishingly, I liked the book. I didn't remember a lot of it, and I was surprised I had done such a good job with it.
It's the story of an American woman who spend a sabbatical year in Israel in 1980. I imagined her with old-line kibbutznik relatives, orthodox relatives in Bnei Brak, and a Russian immigrant cousin. She encounters all those people, has a love affair with a Moroccan architect, and can't decide whether to marry him and stay in Israel or return to the Boston area.
So look it up on Amazon. There is also going to be a Kindle edition, but they haven't finished processing it.

Simultaneous Relaxation and Effort

When I play flute, my right hand often cramps with superfluous effort. After all, it doesn't take much strength at all to close the holes in the body of the flute with the keys. I've seen Youtubes of a girl of eight doing it fantastically, and I'm sure my hands are stronger than hers. But the application of that strength is entirely unnecessary.
My hand cramps because I'm trying to do a bunch of things all at the same time. I'm holding the flute up, I'm pressing down the D# key with my right pinky both to stabilize the instrument and to improve the sound of the notes from E up. I also have to raise my left index finger for D# and D, but I have to close it when I go up to E, and when I go from D to E, I have to open the D# key again. This is an awkward fingering compared to saxophone or clarinet (which has awkwardnesses of its own), and I'm not used to it. So in my effort to do it right, my hand cramps up, especially when I try to do it fast, which, of course, is when I should be applying the least strength, to obtain agility.
So in my last few days of practicing, I've been concentrating part of the time on relaxing my fingers as I play. The problem is that when you concentrate on a movement, even if your purpose is to relax it, you often make it more effortful. How do you make an effort to relax?
It's the same in pottery (and in typing, for that matter). You have to exert enough strength to control the clay, but not so much that you lose control. At this moment I'm listening to the tenor saxophonist, Houston Person, a perfect example of total relaxation and total control.
Yesterday at my pottery class, one of the other students told me that she could see by the way I was working that I loved the clay, which was true and perceptive of her -- I don't know what she saw. I want to play music in a way that also shows how much I love the sounds I'm making, and to write in a way that shows how much I love the language I'm using. That's not something you can try to do. It's something you have to allow to happen by being relaxed, so that you are free to apply the real effort, not the technical effort but the expressive effort.

Music and Politics

Last night we attended a marvelous chamber music concert in the YMCA auditorium here in Jerusalem, part of the international chamber music festival. A brilliant group of musicians from Israel and abroad have assembled for an ambitious series of concerts, and the auditorium, as in past years, was packed.
Despite boycotts and international disapproval, Israel is still able to attract some of the best musicians in the world. I am always grateful to artists who come from abroad for their moral and spiritual support and for their contribution to our cultural life. They strengthen the positive side of Israeli society, for we have an impressively rich cultural and intellectual life.
Is it self-indulgent for the music lovers among us to enjoy concerts like these when our government is doing things we can't approve? Shouldn't we be out fighting injustice? That is, assuming music lovers want to fight injustice, which need not be the case. The connection between politics and art, or, for that matter, ethics and art, are ambiguous, especially abstract art like music.
I want everything to be connected. I wanted cultured people to be good people and vice versa. But that's not the case, is it?
So I spent two thrilling hours hearing the finest music performed by accomplished players with conviction and understanding, sharing the experience with a large and appreciative audience. I didn't have to think about Gaza and the Palestinians, about the inequality between rich and poor in Israel, about the corruption that keeps surfacing, about the unfair treatment of Israel in the world press, because of anti-Semitism -- or about personal problems among our friends and family. These topics, along with global warming, the outbreak of Ebola in Africa, the civil war in Syria and Iraq, the crisis between Russia and the Ukraine -- an endless list -- are mainly things I can't do anything about in any event. So thank God for great music to keep my mind off them!

Knowing about Harmony and Hearing It

I never developed a good ear for harmony, and it makes me an insecure improvisor in jazz. I tried to make up for that weakness by taking 3 years of musicology courses at the Hebrew University several years ago. I actually did pretty well in the counterpoint classes, but I was a weak student of harmony. The final year in the harmony series was a class in analysis of music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker, whose approach reduces music of the classical period to a descent from the dominant to the tonic, to simplify a complex, sophisticated, and valuable approach.
I didn't enjoy learning the Schenker system, mainly because it didn't seem to me to speak to what is original and creative in music (or the other arts). But I have found that my studies of harmony have helped me understand what's going on in the jazz standards that I try to learn and improvise on. If I look at the chord progressions and see how they work, I can also hear them a bit better.
It's interesting to me that Western classical music more or less broke with classical harmony in the 2nd half of the 19th century, but Western popular music, the songs that so much jazz is based on, continued in the tradition and developed it. They continue to speak in the language of Western harmony, which, I think is what Schenker is really about.

To take an analogy, if you study English literature, you'll find that it's based on sentences, almost all of which have subjects, verbs, and indirect or direct objects. Clearly this isn't something that writers made up. So if Western music in the harmonic tradition moves from the dominant to the tonic, as Schenker and his followers among the musicologists showed in their analyses, maybe that isn't a matter of the composer's choice, but rather of the grammar of harmonic music.
Take a look at the chord progression in the A part of John Lewis' "Afternoon in Paris": CM7 | C-7 - F7 | Bb M7 | Bb-7 - Eb7 | Ab M7 | D-7- G7b9 | CM7 - A-7 | D-7 - G7.
Mainly it's the cycle of fifths, from C down to Ab, but then, instead of continuing to Db, the Ab becomes the flat two of G, leading to G7, and back to C, with a turnaround bringing us back to the starting point.
This was a clever move on Lewis' part, and there are a lot of other very clever things about this piece, one of which being that the melody moves from high G to an octave below it, although it's in the key of C (Schenker would say that it should resolve on a C, but Lewis wanted the off-balance feeling of ending on the dominant).
If I hadn't taken the classes in harmony, I wouldn't have been able to understand what Lewis did. The next step is to sit at the piano, play the chords, see how the voice-leading brings them from one to another, and learn how to hear them. Will I have the patience to do that? Tune in next week.

So What Else is New?

In last Friday's (Hebrew) edition of the magazine section of Haaretz, Doron Halutz interviewed Eitan Y. Wilf, a lecturer in anthropology at the Hebrew University, about his book, School for Cool, which is about the supposed dilemma of teaching jazz in conservatories. I say "supposed" dilemma, because I don't think it's very different from teaching painting, drama, creative writing, or cinema in academic programs. Mastery of all these creative arts was once acquired informally, by apprenticeship, and, by making academic disciplines of them, they have become bureaucratized and standardized. It is claimed that the graduates of jazz programs in conservatories all play pretty much the same way, and they are not as creative as the musicians of earlier generations, who learned by acquiring mentors, by taking the risk of playing in jam sessions, by getting jobs in semi-professional bands and moving up to better and better ensembles.
I'm suspicious of that claim because there were thousands of professional musicians in bands during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of them were fairly unmemorable. The great musicians, who played in famous bands, were the best of the best, and it's not to be expected that jazz programs at conservatories should turn out dozens of players like Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, or Lester Young. The jazz scene only turned out one of each.
Still, there is a connection between what is taught and the way it is taught. Jazz today is not what it was fifty years ago, because, as Wilf mentioned in the interview, though the interviewer didn't pick up on it, it is no longer played in night clubs by black male heroin addicts and white male heroin addicts who aspired to be black (to put it overly bluntly).
Incidentally, in his book, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux points out that for black Americans, a career in music was a step up in the socio-economic ladder from the jobs then available to black males, whereas for white musicians, it was either a step down or a step to the side, into Bohemia.
If a young person wants to learn how to play jazz today, he or she can't hang around clubs where jazz is played and listen and try to squeeze in, because there are very few clubs where jazz is played. Aspiring musicians congregate in conservatories today, and that's where they learn from each other and from older musicians.
I had the good fortune to study music informally with Arnie Lawrence, one of the last musicians who learned his art the old way, from mentors, and from brashly taking the risk of playing wherever and whenever he could. Arnie tried very hard to create a jazz scene in New York, where he was among the founders of the jazz program at the New School, one of the institutions that Wilf studied. But jazz just doesn't have the commercial appeal needed for a "scene."
Incidentally (again) I kind of wonder why the thousands of young musicians who have learned to play jazz in the past twenty or thirty years, because they loved the music, haven't managed to create a commercial basis for the music.
There's still a lot of interest in jazz, and a lot of musicians still love to play it, which is a guarantee of its survival. Today jazz is an international music and, in a sense, a classical music. In part that's because it's become academic, and in part it's because of the efforts of musicians like Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who wanted to take jazz out of the world of night clubs and situate it in concert halls, to make it "respectable."

Cathexis

In the old psychoanalytical jargon, that Greek term meant investing emotion in an object or person. I imagine it's not much used currently, but it's perfectly appropriate to the feelings that artists have about their material and equipment. Photographers love a certain camera, cooks love a certain pan, and musicians love their instruments.
When I open my flute case or saxophone case, I feel a surge of cathexis. I cherish my instruments. Recently I was having setup trouble with my baritone saxophone. I was using a Berg Larsen mouthpiece that I like, and Berg Larsen mouthpieces are definitely among the cooler mouthpieces to be using, but I was having trouble finding the right reeds for it.
Like most people who have been playing sax or clarinet for a while, I have built up a collection of mouthpieces, always seeking the one that will make my playing sound best, and I've had the Berg Larsen mouthpiece for a while. But I have also been using a few other ones, including a metal Bari mouthpiece, that I can't control, but which I keep trying, hoping that I can make it work, because there's something promising about it. It gives me a very live tone, but I can't play consistently on it in all the registers of the instrument. I keep thinking that my embouchure and breathing will mature, and then I'll be able to use that mouthpiece, but it hasn't happened, and, realistically, I doubt that it will.
Among my mouthpieces is a Hite, which has always played nicely for me, but which, somehow, I have never felt cathexis for. Yet the other day I tried it again, having given up on the Berg Larsen for a while, and it played the best of all with the reeds I have. So, why don't I love that mouthpiece the way I love my baritone saxophone?
I don't know. But cathexis or not, I keep coming back to that mouthpiece, so I'll stick with it and learn to love it.

Vintage Instruments

Today I stumbled on the following blog entry by Sir James Galway in response to a question about a vintage flute a friend of his had been given. Galway says:

I have always bought modern flutes and enjoyed playing them. ... I am afraid I cannot tell when one is playing on a Lot [a vintage flute] or and Muramatsu [a modern brand]. When everyone is talking about the colors, strength and so on of a particular flute I still fail to hear the difference...  When Trevor Wye changed to a modern flute I still could not hear the difference. Flutes sound mostly the same to me. ...
I guess there is something to the old saying “Seeing is believing”.

I thought this was interesting because I have a vintage Conn tenor saxophone, which I have spent a lot of money on, to recondition it. Even after having it overhauled twice (!), it still played very sharp, so, in desperation, I bought a Lien Chang Taiwanese tenor over the Internet from the factory. It cost me less than I invested in reconditioning the old Conn that was given to me, and it plays better.  The intonation is not problematic, the keywork is smooth, and the sound is fine. But it definitely doesn't look as cool.

In a similar vein, years ago I heard an intimate performance by the fine Israeli tenor player, Jess Koren. He brought two instruments to the gig, a vintage Selmer tenor and a new Selmer horn. He asked the audience which sounded better to us, and most of the people agreed that the vintage horn sounded deeper and fuller. I disagreed, and Jess agreed with my disagreement, saying he has recorded himself on both horns, mixed up the recordings purposely, and he can't tell which one he's playing. So much for the prestige of vintage horns.

I will never sell the Conn, because it was a gift from someone close and important to me, but I doubt that I'll play it very much. Anyway, I've been playing flute more than saxophone in the past few months.

Bach as an Exercise

As I write this I am listening on Youtube to a flautist playing the partita for solo flute, which I have been struggling with for a while, not because I think I'll be able to play it convincingly within the next year or more, but because chipping away at it appears to me to be a great way of improving.
When I was in high school and studying clarinet, I spent a lot of time playing the classic exercises by Klose. While I'm sure they did a lot for my technique, they aren't terribly musical. As an adult, learning saxophone and now flute, instead of playing exercises, I have been trying to play real music.
What's the gain? Not only do you improve your technique by working on passages by Bach or Telemann that are meant to be played fast, but you also are exposed to great music. When I play Bach, I know that I am in the hands of a genius who understood music as well as anyone has ever understood it, and by slowly working on these passages, I gain some of Bach's understanding.

Noticing Your Feelings

At the end of his recital, Benny Grenimann thanked two of his teachers, Stephen Horenstein, whom I've mentioned before. Steve was also one of my teachers, and I have enormous respect for him as a versatile and creative musician, and Eli Digibri, a superb saxophonist, whom I have heard several times and who has consistently bowled me over.
Benny thanked Eli specifically for emphasizing emotion in his playing, which is so obvious that most teachers overlook it, and most musicians ignore it. Playing an instrument is fantastically difficult - as you can tell when you try to play a new instrument (like me on flute). The things you have to pay attention to are innumerable, from your posture and breathing through you fingering and embouchure. It's psychologically impossible to devote your attention to all of those things at once. You have to work on a few of them until they are more or less automatic, and then move on to others, until they, too, are easy to do, and each time you move forward, you encounter new things that demand your full attention.
My flute teacher, Raanan Eylon, has gone to Europe for the summer, so I'm trying to practice and improve without his close guidance, by remembering the things he's told me and applying them. It's not a bad thing to be on your own for a while. It gives you a chance to internalize the things you've been working on without having to include new demands upon your playing. Mainly I'm trying to find the center of the notes immediately and to produce a robust tone (not necessarily a loud one). This means paying very close attention to the very groundwork of playing.
This morning, when I was practicing, I noticed a puzzling flash of fear, puzzling because it wasn't fear of not hitting a note (am I going to get that high F# when I need it?) but, actually, fear of playing a note too well. What was that about?
As I continued playing, I tried consciously to play fearlessly, and, surprisingly, I found myself more aware of my emotions while I played, aware of both the way the music made me feel while I played, and also of the emotions I wanted to express.
This is a very exciting development!
To a degree it is connected to the specific moment in Israeli life, a difficult time of sadness, anger, and frustration, while Israeli soldiers are dying in action, and Gazans are also dying. This crisis has made me emotionally very vulnerable, and I guess it's showing in my attitude toward music, too. I hope this crisis will pass, and that my country will find a way to make peace, and I also hope that I can maintain some of the gains I've been making as a musician by noticing my feelings as I play.

The Appeal of Jazz

Last night I went to hear Benny Grenimann's final recital at the Rubin Academy here in Jerusalem. Benny is a saxophone player, and he performed some of his own pieces and some standards with a rhythm section. The audience was small but very friendly, mainly Benny's fellow students in the jazz program the Academy. I went because I have known Benny's parents forever, and because I'd heard him play before and wanted to hear him again.
He was naturally a little tense. After all, faculty members were listening and would be grading the performance. But he played with aplomb, a nice, rich sound, and good solos.
It's a bit odd that young people should devote four years of intense study to mastering jazz, when there's almost no mass audience for the music. But, following the opinion of Charles Rosen in a piece I once read, I believe that what makes music survive is the interest of musicians, not necessary public interest. If musicians don't want to play some kind of music, they simply won't, and if they do like it, they'll play it and create a public for it.

Practice - Perfect

The New York Times published an article today on the question of whether practice is as important as talent in attaining a high level of performance. The article wasn't all that interesting, because, being an example of responsible journalism, it balanced the conflicting claims and concluded that people really don't know. But it impelled me to write about practicing, something I've been thinking of doing for a while.
I've been practicing the flute regularly for the past couple of years and have been making slower progress than I had hoped. Since I began playing clarinet about sixty years ago and have been playing saxophone for thirty years or more, I thought flute would be a cinch. I even thought at first that I wouldn't need a teacher at all. But I wasn't getting very far on my own, watching Youtube clips for pointers. So I found a fine teacher, Raanan Eylon, maybe one of the best flute teachers in the world.
Raanan has required me to work on the very basic elements of sound production, and our lessons have been almost exclusively focused on exercises with little intrinsic musical appeal. He is extraordinarily patient in listening to me, and he calls forth extraordinary patience in me. I am convinced that working on the very basics of music on the flute has helped my sax playing as well.
So how do I practice?
Some time ago I went to an informal concert by Yakov Hoter, an Israeli Gypsy guitar player, whose virtuosity was astonishing. Somebody asked him about practicing, and he said: The best way of practicing is to do the same thing every day.
Wait a minute! If you practice the same thing every day, how will you ever expand your repertoire?
Obviously he didn't mean to do exactly the same things every day, but he did mean - I assume, and that's how I've been working - to practice a core routine every day, before going on to try new things.
I've developed a core routine for flute, based mainly on exercises Raanan has prescribed, but also on my own long experience as a wind player.
First I do a long tone exercise given to me by Raanan (one that I also did on saxophone - apparently Marcel Moyse was the master teacher who devised it): You start on a note at the top of the register, middle C#, and you descend a half step to C, trying to keep the quality of the notes uniform. Then you go down to B natural, etc., till you get to the bottom of the instrument. I do this exercise at least twice, trying to get a focused sound, without blowing too hard.
Then I play a chromatic scale from low B up to high C. Sometimes I play the scale straight, and sometimes I go up from B to F#, then down from G to C, then up again from G#, etc. etc. That's an exercise I learned on the saxophone with my teacher, Stephen Horenstein.
After that I do a vibrato exercise that Raanan gave me. I start on the B in the middle register of the flute, play it for four counts with a four count vibrato, and then move up to C. Then I go up from C to C#, as high as I can go on the flute. I haven't yet managed to get to high C without a struggle. After going up, I go down chromatically, with the same vibrato, from B to D in the middle register.
I have three more exercises in my daily warmup: an articulation exercise, alternating a throat attack and tonguing (ku-tu-ku-tu); another vibrato exercise prescribed by Raanan involving the major and minor scales; and an exercise of my own based on the Tadd Dameron tune, Good Bait.
I play the tune starting on the low B of the flute, in E major. It ends on E, so I play it in A major, starting on E, going all the way up the flute till I reach the key of C major on the top of the instrument. Then I start the process on the low C of the flute and move up by fourths to Db major and then start again on low C# till I get to B again. I've been doing that for three months or so, and I still can't play the tune fluently in all twelve keys, but I'm getting there!
After doing all that, which takes me about 35 minutes, I play real music. I've been working on Mozart, Telemann, Handel, and Bach - but I also play some standards like "Stella by Starlight" or "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."
Raanan insists on the importance of vibrato, because, he argues, it makes your playing communicate on a subliminal level (listen to Miles Davis' sustained notes in Stella). The vibrato comes from your diaphragm, which is the seat of your emotions, so it tells the listener what you're feeling.
An earlier teacher of mine, the late Arnie Lawrence, also kept urging me to play with vibrato, and it didn't come naturally to me, partly because my early training as a classical clarinetist, and partly because my playing is inhibited. But when I remind myself to employ vibrato, it does communicate more.
At this point all of this practice is more of an end in itself for me, a form of meditation. Listen to Raanan's sound in the link to the Schumann romances. I'll never even be halfway there!

Inhabiting the Notes

My flute practice, ever since I began taking lessons from Raanan Eylon, has been akin to wrestling with a Zen koan: How does a musician get inside the notes he plays?
What does it mean to get inside the notes?
How can you tell whether someone else, who is playing, is inside the notes?
Can you feel as if you're inside the notes and not be there?
There is something deeply frustrating about this pursuit, because "being in the notes" is a metaphor for something that's undefinable.
Maybe "notes" is entirely the wrong term.
It's the sound, not the notes. My musical guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, said that you have to find a sound that you love, that getting a sound that you love is the beginning and the end of music-making.
Raanan talks about seeking the center of the sound. That's a metaphor, too, but it's easier for me to grasp. I think about focusing the sound, another metaphor, but more accessible to me.
What will happen once I manage to get into the notes?
The truth is: what's the point of playing at all, if you're not trying to get into the notes?
Raanan contends that most musicians do not get into the notes they play.
Recently I read that some musicians enter a kind of hypnotic state when they perform solos. That would be getting so far into the notes, that you aren't anywhere else. I think that would also apply to playing in an ensemble, when you're involved, when you're listening to what everyone else is playing and the way what you play fits into it.

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Extinctions

I have just read a two part article by Elizabeth Kolbert that appeared in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_kolbert. Her point is that we are now living in an age of mass extinctions, caused by ourselves, and, most likely, we will also cause our own extinction.
My first response was predictable, and what she was aiming at, I assume: Let's do everything we can to prevent this catastrophe from happening! But since then, I've been wondering whether it makes any difference.
After all, the mass extinction of humanity is inevitable. Does anyone seriously believe that in, say, a million years, there will still be human beings anywhere in the universe? Kolbert mentions the five mass extinctions known to paleontologists, and states, as the following link also does, that we have entered a sixth extinction event (http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html), and that we are its cause.
The last such event took place 65 million years ago, and the enormous biodiversity of the world, which existed before humans started killing off other species, shows that, from the earth's point of view, from the point of view of the life force, not only was there a recovery from that event, but the extinction of certain species (such as large and hungry reptiles) created an opportunity for us warm-blooded creatures to proliferate. So when we all go, something else will thrive, multiply, diversify, and fill the earth up again. And after another fifty million years or so, something bad will happen to them, and they, too, will become extinct. The whole process will start over again, repeatedly, until the sun flares up and engulfs the earth.
Obviously I want my grandchildren to grow up in a safe world, where they can live fulfilling lives, and I am very sad to think that this is rather unlikely, if present trends continue. But I'm not convinced that, in any metaphysical sense, it matters.
We individuals only matter to ourselves, the people we love, and the people who love us. We are not all that important in the universe.
We are all going to die, some painfully, some young, some gently, some violently, and in a hundred years, no living memory of us will remain. Some of us might have produced something that will still be valued after we die, but most of us won't.
We have a clear selfish interest, as a species, in preventing the destruction of the natural world around us, which sustains us, and maybe we will manage to get our act together and do it. We also might manage to poison the biosphere so thoroughly that life will face a setback so serious that it will take it a billion years to recover. But, unlike us, the world has time.