Pampered Classical Music Fans and Beethoven's Stormy Emotions

I just spent the weekend (Dec. 5-7, 2019) in the Pastoral Hotel at Kfar Blum, a large kibbutz in the north of Israel, overeating and listening to great classical pianists and other musicians. One of the highlights of the weekend for me, aside from a Beethoven piano concerto and virtuoso piano performances of pieces of Scriabin and Alkan, was a fascinating lecture on music and the emotions by a brilliant man who combines the highest level of musical performance and teaching with scientific work in brain science: Eitan Globerson.
Among the many things Globerson discussed was the mysterious way that music arouses emotions in us. He compared it to the expression of emotions in the pitch, prosody, and tempo of speech. The following day, listening to a performance of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto by Ching-Yun Hu, a dynamic and assertive pianist, I thought of Globerson's discussion of emotional expression and found myself noticing the rapid movement from one emotional state to another in each movement of the concerto.
Obviously Beethoven was closely attentive to the flow and ebb of his own emotions, excitement, calm, anger, solace, love ... And his audience expected to hear more than one emotion in every movement of the concerto.
No one suffered to hear the music at Kfar Blum, unless it was in paying for the event. The rooms were spacious and comfortable, the food was delicious and ample (an understatement), and the acoustics in the concert hall were fine. It's a privilege to have the music brought to you - once you've traveled up to the far north of Israel - rather than having to get to a concert hall.
Classical music doesn't draw a huge, young audience, but it still attracts listeners and brilliant young practitioners. My main problem with it is keying myself up to the highest level of attention at a concert. My mind wanders. I sometimes fall asleep. I don't hear a lot of what's in the music. But I do take in the sound of classical music, even if passively, and I love that sound.
By the way, the other great pianist who performed, Nicolas Namoradze, was a gentle and more self-effacing performer, and he played some music that he had composed. The differences between the two musicians added to the interest of the concerts.

Why Can't I Memorize "Freedom Jazz Dance"?

The teacher of the blues class I started attending at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Yaki Levi, a great drummer and pianist, assigned "Freedom Jazz Dance" to us, a famous song by Eddie Harris. He wanted us to learn it because it's all on a single chord: Bb7. After a week of working on it, I still don't have it in my ears or under my fingers, and I've been playing it both on flute and on tenor sax. Maybe if I just did it in one key it would be easier.  But I should be able to hear how it goes.
In general I'm not very good at playing what I hear and memorizing. I can play a bunch of standards by memory, but I haven't really learned the changes, the chords underlying the melody, because I find that very difficult.
But there are no chords to memorize in this case. So why am I having trouble remembering a fairly simple song: two measures (15 notes), then two measures of rests, then another two measures (12 notes), and another two measures of rests, then four measures (32 notes), for a total of 59 notes. That shouldn't be an impossible feat of memorization.
However, the song doesn't have a conventional melody. It's composed of leaps up and down that move in fourths without spelling out chords. Obviously the key is to understand the logic of the piece, and I'm working on it.
Perhaps by dint of drilling it, the logic will come clear to me.

Tenor

Stupidly I once thought the alto sax was a wimpy instrument. Why would Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Cannonball Adderley, Arnie Lawrence, and Phil Woods (to name just the musicians who come to mind immediately) have played a wimpy instrument?
However, think of the tenor players everyone admires: Lester Young (who could play with power when he wanted to), Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and a dozen other powerful African-American musicians who used the tenor sax assertively.
When I took up saxophone again as a grownup, I started with tenor, but I eventually gravitated toward the baritone sax, which is more a supportive than a self-assertive instrument. I'm not a powerful African-American man (which isn't to say that there haven't been great white tenor players like Stan Getz, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims).
However, recently I enrolled in a blues workshop, and I decided to take out my tenor again. I didn't feel like lugging my baritone around, and I thought it was time to try out my first saxophone love. It's fun to use a new voice and find myself in it. Maybe I can channel some of those powerful players.

I don't Get It. What's so Great About Philip Glass?

He's supposed to be a minimalist, but the production of Akhnaten we just saw, a simultaneous broadcast of the matinee of the Metropolitan Opera, was hardly minimalist.
Samuel Becket is a minimalist. His stages are bare, and the lives of his characters are pared down to nothing. Philip Glass writes long, loud, elaborate, pretentious operas.
I went to hear Akhnaten mainly out of curiosity, not expecting to enjoy it, and my expectations were fulfilled. What is there to enjoy except the stage effects surrounding the production? The music is monotonous. The opera has virtually no plot, no characters, no drama. It's slow-moving, pompous, and bombastic. Some people call it hypnotic. I don't go the opera to be hypnotized. I go, if I do at all, to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the music.
Yet if you read about Glass, you are exposed to a story of phenomenal success. He is prolific, widely performed, and highly regarded. I would call it a case of the emperor's new clothes, but Glass isn't naked. He's overdressed, like the singers in this production, in outlandish costumes that mainly have little or nothing to do with ancient Egypt.
Okay, I'm not an opera fan. Mainly I see opera productions as money misspent. Even though my wife and I paid about a hundred dollars for our two seats at the mere broadcast of the opera, and the people who go to the real thing pay many times more than that, we are told that the broadcasts are subsidized, and that the Metropolitan Opera needs contributions to keep going. In a country swarming with homeless people (and a world swarming with hungry refugees), they have a nerve to present themselves as a charity.
Rather than spend millions of dollars on super-lavish productions, they should stage the operas frugally, in a manner that lets the music come out. After all, the music is what it's about, not the costumes, sets, and special effects.
A few years ago we heard a production of Cosi fan tutte in the opera house of Lyons. The singers were fine, the orchestra was high level, and the staging was simple. Who needs anything more?
But if you put Akhnaten without all the flimflam, you 'd see it for the empty thing that it is.

The Music of Jewish Prayer (and something about my music)

Judit Niran Frigyesi's book, Writing on Water, the Sounds of Jewish Prayer, is about a unique kind of music: the way that traditional Hungarian Jews used to chant their prayers. As she describes it, the chanting is inseparable from the words of the prayers, and the meaning of prayer is conveyed as much by the chant as by the words.
The word "chant," is my own. Figyesi does not use it at all in reference to the prayers she describes. The basic musical foundation is what we would call nusah in modern Hebrew (she renders the word in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of her informants: nisech). Cantors improvise on this foundation and add melodies. The Jewish men whose prayer she studied would never think of praying without this chanting.
They were children in the 1920s and 1930s, and they grew up learning to pray, with melody, as they learned how to talk.
Toward the end of the book, Frigyesi describes the revival of the Hungarian Jewish community after the collapse of Communism, in the mode of Modern Orthodoxy, which is essentially the kind of Judaism I have come to know here in Israel.
It's not the same thing.
But many musical experiences are deeply meaningful and not the same thing. Judit describes the many concerts she went to when she was a high school student and then a student at the music academy, and she also describes the experience of recording Gregorian chants with a chorus of which she was a member.
Neither Judit nor I can make ourselves into the elderly Holocaust survivors she describes, who kept alive the organic Judaism of their childhood. For me, music is something largely separate from my religious observance, though when I attend services I am carried along by the music and join in the singing. This morning I had an unexpected and unfamiliar feeling while I was practicing flute: I suddenly felt as if someone else were playing, and I was both standing outside it and doing it.
This is connected with to what Frigyesi writes about music and prayer.
I wonder whether I will ever recapture that feeling.

Another Opera

I attended a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera Company's production of Turandot by Puccini, an extravaganza. Everything was on the highest professional level: the singing, the orchestra, the staging, the costumes, and the sets. And it was mainly sublime.
Because it was broadcast, there were English subtitles, and I knew exactly what they singing and what was going on in the plot, which is, to my mind, offensive. At the moment I' listening to a Youtube clip of the opera performed by the Wichita Opera Company, a production that probably cost fifty times less than the Metropolitan production. But it sounds pretty damn good.
What was the point in the mid-1920s, of writing an opera based on a Persian folk tale, transposed to China, about a princess who, to avoid marriage, arranged to have her suitors beheaded, until, along comes a hero who solves her three riddles and forces her to marry him? Did it mean anything to a continent recovering from a murderous war, on the brink of political crises that eventually led to another, even more murderous war? Did it have any plausible relevance then? or now? Are we to take this as a serious exploration of the myth of the femme fatale? Or is it just an operatic convention?
My take on it is that a serious exploration of the mythical dimensions of the plot would be a waste of intellectual energy. The ridiculous plot is merely an occasion for fantastic singing and musical performance. It's trivial.
But I'm not an opera fan. I find it astonishing that people are prepared to spend so much money on staging operas and attending them. That people train for years and years to become opera singers. That composers still write operas. I acknowledge that they are a significant part of Western musical and theatrical culture, and it's impressive that a city as small as Wichita, Kansas (fewer than 400,000 population) should have such a high level opera company.
Still, what's the point?
Later this year I'm going to attend a couple of more Metropolitan broadcasts. Maybe I'll be converted.

Books and a Concert - Why Bother Staging a Handel Opera?

I recently read two books about music: How Shostakovich Change my Mind by Stephen Johnson and An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. The former is by a music critic who responds very deeply to music and who was helped to deal with his bi-polar mental state by listening to Shostakovich. The latter is a novel narrated by an English violinist, and its very much about the experience of playing in a string quartet and the meaning of music in the protagonist's life. Last spring I read Romain Rolland's long novel, Jean-Christophe, which is about a composer, for whom music is the most meaningful thing in his life. All three books illustrate the difficulty of writing about music.
How does one avoid getting technical when talking about music? How does one share one's personal experience of music with people who might be equally moved by the music that moves one, but who associate it with entirely different emotional experiences? And, in general, how does music arouse emotion in the listener? What kind of emotional experience does music offer?
I wrote rhetorical questions just now, because there are, as far as I know, no good answers to them.
Last night I went to a performance of Handel's Orlando Furioso, an opera based on Ariosto's vast poem, which in turn, is based (loosely) on the Old French epic, La Chanson de Roland. This opera is rarely performed, for good reason, and it raises more questions about music.
The music is heavenly, of course. It was performed marvelously by Israeli singers from the Tel Aviv Opera Company, accompanied by fine musicians. But the story is ridiculous. The proposition of representing Orlando's insanity with stately baroque music is nearly a contradiction in terms.
I love baroque music. Recently I have been working on Telemann duets for two flutes. But for me, the main emotion that it conveys is that of marveling at its abstract beauty (though the religious emotions conveyed by Bach's cantatas is certainly palpable). However, secular passions, such as romantic love, were often regarded as threatening in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, as it used to be called simplistically, and the purpose of music was not to express and wallow in emotion so much as to crystallize and control it.
The Henry Crown Auditorium was packed with mainly elderly music lovers, and I found myself wondering what drew them to it and what they got out of it. Attending a concert of classical music is a bit like attending religious services, a way of confirming one's values and solidarity with those who share them, adulation of Western Classical Music. That holds for me, as well.
However, I was puzzled by the opera itself, wondering what it could have meant to the listeners for whom it was intended, and by what it could possibly mean for us today? According to the program, and I knew it anyway, Ariosto's impossibly long poem was one of the most influential works of literature written in the 16th century. Today it is probably unread and unreadable. Maybe that's the main thing we have to learn from the opera and the poem it's based on: how far away we are from there.
I applaud the performance of this opera, especially since it was done so well, and I'm glad I attended, but it didn't make me want to hear the other forty-one operas that Handel wrote.

A Useful Ear-Training Exercise

Helmut Eisel, a German Klezmer clarinetist, one of the teachers at the workshop I just attended in Jerusalem, directed useful sessions in improvisation (as did Raul Juarena, a master of the bandoneon, a kind of button accordion widely used in tango). Helmut, without knowing it, echoed a lesson of my musical guru, Arnie Lawrence: you don't play an instrument, you become an instrument. This is how Helmut interprets the word "klezmer," a Yiddish word that comes from two Hebrew words: kli (a vessel or tool) and zemer (song). In Helmut's view, all true musicians are klezmerim, vessels of song. I'll buy that.
However, this is a challenging proposition even for very gifted musicians, though you see and hear it when great musicians play. Emil Aybinder, whose workshop I attended, plays the accordion, a heavy, clumsy instrument (in my opinion) as if it were a part of his body, without thinking about where his fingers should go, how he should move the bellows, or what sound quality he wants. He just plays. The music flows out of him.For a musician of Emil's skill, there appears to be no gap between what his inner ear imagines and what he plays on the accordion. That's the result of years of intense, committed practice, based on inborn musicality.
Getting back to Helmut's lesson, although we were at a klezmer workshop, he gave a session about playing the blues - elementary but helpful for me, even though I've been playing blues for a long time. (Incidentally, it's important to be able to learn from music classes even when they are at a level far more elementary than yours; one must always go back to fundamentals.)
In his class, Helmut suggested the following exercise, claiming that within weeks it would take effect, and we would be able to improvise well: (1) play a note on your instrument; (2) sing that note; (3) sing a simple melody starting on that note; (4) play the melody on your instrument. (5) start over again.
I'm not a natural musician. I find it difficult to play by ear. I don't like the way I sing. But I'm determined to keep at Helmut's exercise. I've been doing it with the flute, which is somewhat difficult for a man who sings an octave below what the flute plays. I've only done it for a few days, so I can't vouch for the results yet. But I'm hopeful.
Incidentally, this exercise is similar in many ways to one suggested by Robert Dick, who has posted a lot of useful clips on flute technique, one of which is to hum into the flute while you play.

Report from Yet Another Workshop

This summer I took part in the annual Klezmer workshop at the Jerusalem Academy for Music and Dance: 7 days of playing music with other musicians. I took part in the Balkan Music ensemble, led by the accordion virtuoso, Emil Aybinder. Emil was not particularly interested in me as a musician, as he saw his purpose as encouraging the young musicians in our group to practice fanatically in order to become successful professionals. I didn't mind.For me, participating in the workshop was confirmation that I can learn to play a new style  of music, and I can grow as a musician, even at my advanced age. Also, playing with young musicians is a kick.

Here's a video of one of our performances.

Among the teachers at the workshop were two world class clarinetists: Corrado Giufreddi and Franklin Cohen. I attended their master classes and saw and heard how they work with young musicians, and I also heard them perform. What a privilege!

In addition, a quartet based in Munich also came, the Gitanes Blondes. They have played a lot with Giora Feidman, one of the musicians responsible for reviving Klezmer music. Playing with them was fun and inspiring.

Best of all, these great musicians were all friendly and accessible, modest, if you will.

My Baritone Saxophone as a Vehicle

Gerry Mulligan was the first person I ever heard of who played the baritone saxophone, and I wasn't drawn to it. I admired the tenor playing of Sonny Rollins, and when I talked my parents into buying my first saxophone for me - I was probably in tenth grade - I acquired a Selmer Mark VI, which I sold, to my lasting regret, when I decided I would never play saxophone again.
Much later, when I took up saxophone again, I heard someone playing a baritone sax in a quartet and couldn't imagine why anyone would play that instrument.
Nevertheless, a few years after that, I bought a clunky Grassi baritone from a musician who was retiring from the police band, and I played that for a while.
Then, when my father passed away, in 1992, I got a bit of unexpected cash with the settlement of his will, and bought my present instrument, a Selmer Superaction 80, with which I am more or less in love.
It took me a long time to sell the Grassi, and I don't miss it.
Owning a baritone saxophone is a bit like owning the ball when you choose up sides for a pick up game: you've got to be included, even if you aren't a great player.
I've played in wind orchestras, big bands, and saxophone quartets because I'm the one lugging the bari - and I've become a decent player.
In a few hours I'm going to attending a music workshop at the Jerusalem Academy of Music as a baritone player. True, the higher instruments get to play the melody more often, but for every baritone sax there are at least six altos and twelve clarinets.
An instrument takes you places both musically and physically.

What's a Musical Idea?

Years ago I took a course in musical cognition in the musicology department of the Hebrew University, and I was frustrated by the huge gap between the cognition that was the subject of the course and the cognition that interested and still interests me.
My interest in the subject was then related to my efforts to learn to improvise in jazz, and the course was concerned with the way the brain processes pitch and the other basic elements of music.
I'm still interested in musical cognition, in how a person thinks in the medium of music. I want to know how a concert pianist commits complex works to his or her memory, how a conductor learns a score and gets an orchestra to play it the way he or she wants it to be played, how a composer conceives of music before he or she writes it out, and how a jazz improviser invents a solo over the harmonies of a standard. The academic study of cognition is very far from explaining matters that complex.
In his popular lectures on music, Gil Shohat often speaks of something quite simple in a classical piano work, such as two descending notes, as a musical idea, which is repeated throughout the piece. While I see his point, and I cannot deny the presence of that feature in the piece, once he points it out to me, the descent from B to A, for example, seems much too simple to be called an idea.
Recently I have been trying to learn the first of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's duets for two flutes, music that is so full of idea that it's hard to play and follow. I have been trying to give my practice meaning and direction by noticing his ideas and wondering just what I would call an idea if I were analyzing the piece.
Here's the first measure of the piece:

How many musical ideas do these ten notes convey? One idea is the rhythm, the division of the three beats of the measure into nine triplets. Another idea is the spelling out of the e minor triad on the first beat of the measure, telling the listener (and player) what the key is. A third idea is jumping down from the high 'e' to 'b' and then continuing down the scale rather than extending the initial arpeggio. Yet another idea, and an interesting one, is turning the last note in the measure, the low 'e,' which ought to be, as it were, the resolution of the movement, into a passing note and landing on "d#" at  the beginning of the next measure, which echoes the shape of the first measure:

Thus, that shape is also a musical idea.
It would be tedious to go on, as my point is to point out the complexity of both musical ideas and the task of identifying them. Bear in mind, that these two measures appear before the second flute joins in and adds an exponential element to the piece.
Playing W. F. Bach's music is an enriching experience. My purpose in looking for the musical ideas as I learn to play the piece is to play it more intelligently, and also to keep up my interest and avoid playing mechanically as I play the piece over and over again in my effort to master it.

My Solo and Benjamin Goodman's

On Friday morning, May 31, 2019, I stood up with my massive baritone saxophone dangling from a strap around my neck and played a song the Muppets made famous, “Ma Nah Ma Nah,” backed by the (very) amateur wind orchestra where I play every Tuesday night. Usually the baritone saxophone has a rather modest (though important) role in the pieces we play (things like songs from “West Side Story” and “The Pirates of the Caribbean”). It accompanies the rest of the orchestra, from the bottom, along with the other low instruments: tuba, trombone, and baritone horn. So, getting a chance to solo in front of the band was an unusual challenge and opportunity. I’m grateful to our young and energetic conductor, Yonatan Leneman, for asking me to do it.

My solo was not terrifically demanding, but it was jazzy and fun. I practiced very regularly and consistently, probably more than I had to, to get it right, and I was almost satisfied with the way I played. The venue was outdoors in the courtyard of the new state religious elementary school in the Israeli city of Mevaseret Zion, and the audience consisted of the pupils, their parents, and their grandparents. Before playing, I told the audience that I spent my first months in Israel in the Absorption Center at Mevaser Zion, in 1973, long before the city was developed intensively.

I took the assignment as seriously as though I were going to be on stage at the Jerusalem Theater, though I can’t say I was nervous. Excited, yes. And confident.

The night before my solo, we hosted a piano recital in our home by a young and extremely accomplished pianist, originally from England: Benjamin Goodman. He played an ambitious and difficult program, including works by Bach, Debussy, Liszt, and Schumann, for an intimate audience, mainly our friends. It was a thrilling performance. Benjamin has fantastic technique and plays communicatively with deep understanding. He spoke briefly, modestly, and informatively about the pieces before he played them, with his fine Oxford accent (“Waltz” came out “Woots”).

The difference between the high level of Benjamin’s playing and the profundity of the music he played puts my solo on “Ma Nah Ma Nah” in an ironic light, though I’m proud of myself for performing creditably.

I have a childhood prejudice for classical music. I was brought up to respect and appreciate it. My mother used to take me to Saturday matinee concerts at Carnegie Hall. I was taught classical piano for a few years, till I knew I was going nowhere with it. When I took up clarinet, the orientation was definitely classical, and I never rebelled. I love jazz and listen to it often. I admire the skill and musicality of jazz musicians. I heard a lot of folk music when I was growing up in Greenwich Village and attending a leftist school, where, when we were required by law to have a nuclear air raid drill (as if anything would have protected us if the Russians had bombed New York), we gathered in the basement of the school and sang peace songs. Since moving to Israel, I have also listened to a lot of Middle Eastern music and enjoy it. The skill of our players like Yair Dalal and Taiseer Elias thrills me. Nevertheless, at bottom, I prefer hearing Western classical chamber works (symphonies often are too bombastic for me – I have tried and failed to enjoy Mahler).

When I took up flute, I had a phone conversation with my prospective teacher and told him I was interested in playing baroque music. But right afterward I said I wasn’t interested only in baroque music. I wanted to master the instrument (I am getting closer, after more years than it would have taken a gifted high school student – indeed, more years than it took me to get to a higher level on clarinet when I was in high school). My idea was that I wanted to be able to play well enough to read duets with friends, not to perform. Though I did work on a piece by Schumann with a pianist and perform it for a home audience, at the end of the recital he gave at our house.

Now I’m working on flute duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, complex and demanding music. I’ve been practicing the first one for a couple of weeks now and am still nowhere near to mastering it enough to imagine performing it. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever get there. I play it with my teacher in my lessons, and that’s about as public as it’s going to get. The pleasure of playing with him is elevating. And the effort to learn a piece well, and then to learn another one and another one, increases my respect for Benjamin Goodman infinitely.

Listening Mindfully to Yourself

Yesterday my flute teacher warned me that when I start working on the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (an older contemporary of Hayden and Mozart, but not exactly a classical composer, like his younger brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel), I have to be careful not to make concentration on the difficult notes distract me from the quality of my sound and musicality in general.
WFB's duets are full of unexpected rhythms and note choices (a direction beyond baroque toward rococo), making it interesting and challenging to play, but I see what my teacher means about focusing on overcoming the technical difficulties of mastering the pieces and trying to play them at the speed they're meant to be played at. I'm working on the first of the six duets now, and I've decided to play it slowly enough that I can hear every note that I play. Not that I don't try to hear what I'm playing whenever I play. But minds wander.
I'm consciously trying to turn my flute practice into a meditative exercise, listening to the notes the way I learned to pay attention to my breathing while meditating. Obviously the aim of playing this way is to have every note be full and focused, in time, in tune, and at the right level of dynamics. But, as an experiment, I'm not going to try to correct my playing, just to notice it. You can't improve something unless you are fully aware of what it is.
When you're taught mindfulness meditation, you're told to focus on your breath without trying to change it in any way by breathing more deeply or more slowly, or better in any way. You aren't preparing for a test in breathing. I think the same idea works when you play an instrument or sing. Which doesn't mean that one doesn't aspire to sound more beautiful. However, I have faith that it will happen as a result of non-judgmental awareness. Yes, my sound on the high 'e' as I played that arpeggio leading up to it didn't emerge at all, or it was too loud. I heard it. I will play that arpeggio again and listen to the high 'e,' and if it comes out better, I will notice that. I will also notice each of the notes leading up to the 'e.' But I won't scold myself if they don't sound the way I'd like them to sound. I'll play them a few more times, listening carefully to see if there's any improvement. If there is, fine. If note, I'll try again tomorrow.

finding the right thing to play

In my flute lessons I have been playing duets with my teacher. It's valuable to me to hear his sound and musicality, and it's enjoyable.
We played pretty much everything in a well-known collection of duets edited by Louis Moyse. Then I started printing out duets from a huge archive of flute music that I purchased from the Clarinet Institute of Los Angeles. I had found myself playing a fair amount of baroque music and wanted to move forward at least to the nineteenth century.
After poking around among the files in the archive, I discovered a Danish composer from the first half of the 19th century named Niels Peter Jensen (1802-1846), whose duets were fun to play and almost easy enough for me to sightread. After going through a set of six of those, I decided against playing more of his stuff and found a set of duets by the French composer, Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier (1782-1835, what a great name!), who is best known for a set of flute exercises that he composed. The Berbiguier music isn't much more challenging than the Jensen. When I first started playing it, I thought it was pedestrian, but it grew on me as I worked on it, and some of it, when I played it with my teacher, was quite lovely.
Amusingly, my teacher was unfamiliar with both the Jensen and Berbiguier duets, though he had no trouble at all reading his part when we played them, and I hope that was fun for him. He's about the age of my older children, and most of his students are kids, so it must be a welcome change for him to be working with a mature person.
At my next lesson I plan to finish with the Berbiguier duets and move on to something much harder (and more interesting), the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784), which are bringing me back toward the baroque, but WFB was an idiosyncratic composer, and his duets are quirky and challenging, full of unexpected notes and rhythmic figures.
The problem for me (my teacher doesn't assign music) is to find a level that's easy enough for me to play satisfactorily (though I don't aspire to get up to performance level) but still challenging, and not frustrating.

Musical Gear and Sound Concepts

Men (especially) are into gear: golf clubs, fishing tackle, cameras, and musical instruments, and accessories.
I moved through three flutes before settling on my excellent Sankyo silver flute. First I bought a used flute made by the Blessing company long ago, when they still made flutes (now, I think, they make tubas and such). Then I bought a slightly better used flute, an Armstrong. I played that until my flute teacher said that I'd made enough progress to deserve a better flute, and I bought a DiZhao flute that had been privately imported to Israel by a flute student who hoped to make some money by dealing in instruments (and soon gave up the idea).
That flute was a nice instrument with open holes and a B foot, and I played it for two years or so. Then I took it to Ginzberg, the excellent instrument store in Tel Aviv, intending to trade it in for a slightly better used instrument. However, I was persuaded to buy a much better used instrument, for considerably more than I had intended to spend, after spending comparing a number of flutes for quite a long while.
Last winter, on a trip to the US, I went to the Flutistry store in Boston, thinking I could improve on the Sankyo either by trading it in for a slightly better instrument or buying a new head joint. The people at Flutistry reassured me that I hadn't overpaid drastically for  my instrument, and that it was a very good one. So I decided to see about improving on then head joint. After trying out a dozen or more of them, I ended up buying a second hand head joint by Emanuel, a highly reputed Massachusetts flute maker. I was convinced that it gave me a richer sound than the one that came with the Sankyo.
Over the months that I've been playing on the new head joint, my sound has improved (at least to my own ear, and my teacher is pleased). Erica Schiller, the vice president of Flutistry, who helped me pick the head joint, spoke about "sound concept," which is not a term I was familiar with, but I like it. The Emanuel head joint has enabled me to produce a tone closer to my concept of the tone I would like to have.
This morning, just out of curiosity, as it were, I took out the original Sankyo head joint and tried it out again, playing the same thing first on it and then on the Emanuel, and vice versa. The truth is, I could barely hear or feel any difference. So, did I waste the money I laid out on the Emanuel head joint? I don't think so. I think the new head joint taught me to play closer to the way I hope to play, and, having learned that, I was able to get a similar sound from the old head joint.
By way of demonstration, at one of my lessons my teacher had forgotten to bring his own flute with him and was playing the Armstrong flute I once owned, which I donated to the conservatory where he teaches. He has a full, strong, focused sound on his professional quality flute, and, not surprisingly, when he was playing the Armstrong student flute, he had a full, strong, focused sound. That's the way he plays.
Gear can only get you so far.

Abundant Availability

The saxophone quartet I play in (I couldn't call it "my" quartet) has a number called "Black and White Rag." We had a disagreement about how to play it. One of us thought the eighths should swing, but the others said that was wrong for ragtime style, so I looked it up on Youtube. Sure enough, I found a recording based on the player piano roll, probably recorded by the composer himself, George Botsford, and the eights are played straight! Later on I found a recording of a sax quartet playing the piece, but I won't put in the link because the sound is very muddy, and they were playing it much too fast.
Now I take it for granted that I can( simply type in the name of a piece, a musician, or a composer, and almost without doubt I'll be able to hear what I want to hear in a minute or less. But when I started taking music lessons, to hear what you wanted to hear (Reginald Kell, say, when I was taking clarinet in high school), you had to have access to a good music library and go there, or a good record store, go there, and buy the record.
The abundance of available music changes everything (musically, at any rate). If you're learning a piece, you can hear a great musician play it, often more than one great musician in more than one rendition. This can be inspiring, instructive, or discouraging. I'll never be able to play a Bach sonata on the flute as well as the masters whose recordings I've listened to.
Performing musicians lose out on royalties for their CDs when people upload them to Youtube, and I don't imagine that streaming services like Spotify pay them very much. On the bright side, presence on the web can attract live audiences to concerts, and in any case a lot of people, like me, prefer live music to recorded music.
Right now I'm listening to a Canadian saxophone quartet playing ragtime arrangements. They're better than we are, and it's useful to hear just in what ways they outdo us. If we rehearse enough, maybe we'll get closer to their level.

Composers Old and New

We live in a big house and have a baby grand piano.
In the 1990s, when a lot of musicians from the USSR came to Israel, we were part of a project begun by Geoff Greenfield, a physician and musician. He arranged concerts in people's homes, so the musicians could earn a little money while they were learning Hebrew and finding their way in their new country. After that we continued to host concerts now and then. We invite our friends and hope they'll fill our living room, so the musicians can go home with a decent amount of money.
About a year and a half ago Geoff arranged a recital for himself and a pianist (to whom all the proceeds went). At that recital he played a piece for solo flute by Emanuel Vahl, who attended the concert. After that Emanuel kept pressuring us to host a concert including other works of his, and we finally got around to it last week.
He got four fine musicians to prepare the recital and perform: Mina Dashevsky, a pianist; Michael Schwartzman, a violinist; Alexander Shochat, a violist; and Tehila Machado, a cellist. The first piece they performed was Mozart's first quartet for piano and strings, a sublime work of art. While listening to it, I was full of wonder: how could any human being have created such a splendid thing? The musicians played it wonderfully, with great communication among them and between them and the audience, who were much closer to them than is possible even in an intimate concert hall.
After the Mozart, they played the "Jewish Quartet" by Vahl. The audience liked that too, and they were very moved by his presence and the few words he spoke about the work. We were pleased that we were able to bring his music to the attention of a new audience.
After the intermission, they played the Brahms Quartet no 3, another monumental piece of chamber music. I told Emanuel after the concert that he was very brave, putting his work between Mozart and Brahms. It worked.
The Brahms has astonishing emotional depth, not that the music is less sublime than Mozart's, or that Mozart is emotionally shallow. As I listened, I was thinking that Brahms was not only aware of his deepest feelings, but he also was capable of working with them and expressing them in musical ideas.
Last night I attended a concert at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance devoted to the work of an acquaintance of ours, Menachem Zur, an important contemporary composer. His music is much more cerebral than Vahl's, and extremely difficult to play. At the end of the concert he graciously thanked the musicians for their hard work in learning and performing the pieces. Some of them were young, and I hope they were paid for their efforts.
Menachem has gained a lot of local and international recognition. He was a professor at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Emanuel is largely unknown. He came to Israel rather late in life (he's over eighty now), and he is frustrated by his anonymity. If you write music with the aim of reaching a large audience, maybe you shouldn't write contemporary classical music. Menachem doesn't mind it that his work isn't very accessible. He has very clear ideas of what he wants to do and does it. Emanuel's music is easier to listen to, and he wants to be heard. His ambition has not faded with age.
Both Emanuel and Menachem, who is in his mid seventies, continue to compose, and I hope I will continue to hear their music.

Musical Identities

Since I am an Ashkenazi Jew, I ought to love cantorial virtuosity a la Yossele Rosenblatt, but I don't. I also ought to love Klezmer music, which I enjoy listening to a lot less than to other kinds of music, including Andalusian music, with which I have absolutely no ethnic bond.
My jazz guru, Arnie Lawrence, quoted his jazz guru, Clark Terry, who said that the note doesn't know who played it. I love African-American music, even though I'm not African-American, and a lot of the masters of African-American music aren't of that persuasion either.
One is always surprised (though by now we should be over that) that so many brilliant performers of Western Classical music are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - not immigrants from those countries to the West, but people like Lang Lang who grew up in China. I have read that Lang Lang regularly meets (or met) with Daniel Barenboim to deepen his understanding of certain aspects of the classical repertoire, but I imagine there are hundreds of classical pianists from European countries and North America who would also love to meet with Barenboim for a week of private consultation for the same purpose.
I also remember reading that Wynton Marsalis, who is now the elder statesman of jazz, was a fine classical trumpet player when he was in high school, and Gunther Schuller more or less discovered him and exposed him to jazz (this might be untrue).
It is true that music, such as Indian classical music, is deeply embedded in the culture that produced it, and while listening to it one feels connected to something essentially Indian, or that, as an outsider, one can never deeply understand the music the way an Indian does. Nevertheless, I'm positive that the mere fact of being one of the one billion Indians on the planet doesn't guarantee that you'll have a deep appreciation of this sitar music. Nor does it matter whether or not you have ever set foot in India to feel a deep affinity with the music and interest in it.
Music travels. And music is also a means of transportation. You can get into a culture through its music, and you can also get out of your own culture (or expand it) through different kinds of music. But the connection between a culture and its music is not straightforward.
Years ago I got to know an American jazz drummer who was in Israel for a year. He was curious about Middle Eastern ethnic music, and I mentioned a creative group called Bustan Abraham, which takes ethnic music and runs with it. Without listening to me (that's the kind of man he is), he dismissed the idea out of hand. He wanted to hear AUTHENTIC Middle Eastern music. Screw him.
The music of a performer who has grown up in a tradition and learned from its masters can be great, if the performer is great, or it can be mediocre, if the performer isn't so great. It can be authentically uninteresting. 

Music as Language (3)

I'm not trying to master Bach's E Minor sonata for flute and continuo, since I know I'll never master it. But I've been working on it for a few weeks and gradually coming to feel that I understand what's going on in the piece. Ra'anan Eylon, my first flute teacher, used to say, when he didn't think I was playing something right, that he didn't understand the music.
My son-in-law, who took a BA in linguistics, rejected the idea of music as a language, since it doesn't denote anything. But a listener can tell whether a performer understands what he or she is playing, whether the phrasing and dynamics, the tempo, the general feel, testify to a grasp of the music. And a sophisticated listener, who is familiar with the music, might either confirm that the performer's understanding was convincing, or object to it, or disagree but concede that it added to his or her own understanding of the music. If music isn't, at least metaphorically, a language, how can it be understood or misunderstood?
Learning to play the Bach sonata, or any other demanding piece, is like learning to recite a great poem or examining a great painting square centimeter by square centimeter, though a painting doesn't direct your experience as a viewer as powerfully as art that unfolds in time.
Written music is a bit like a computer program that makes the performer move and breathe the way it wants him or her to do. But people aren't sound cards. The performer responds to the instructions sent by the score, both before and after playing the notes. A comical way of looking at the performance of a string quartet, the musicians' movements, is to think of them as automatons whose behavior is controlled by the score on the music stands in front of them. But that's an unacceptable take on what's happening.
But reading music, especially when you are playing with other people, is participation in a scripted conversation, like the written dialogue in a play or film. You respond to many stimuli: to your own playing, to the playing of the others, and to the audience. Your performance is also a kind of dialogue with the composer, and with all the other musicians who have played the piece in question, even if you haven't heard them.
I have often been in groups of musicians playing a piece for the first time, a piece no one in the group has heard before, and I've often been astonished by how quickly the music takes shape. Together, the players understand it.

Investments in Music

On my recent trip to the Boston area, I went to a shop called Flutristy, which specializes in high end flutes made by local Massachusetts flute makers, like Powell and Haynes. I correctly thought that a new head joint would improve my sound, and this proved to be the case.
I spent a lot of time, maybe two hours,  in a small room with a tray full of head joints. I was helped tactfully by Erica Schiller, the vice president of the company, and I ended up with a pre-owned head joint made by Emanuel, who makes flutes and head joints in Deerfield, MA. I ended up paying a considerable amount of money to improve my tone, hardly an investment, since I'll never get a monetary return on it. But there is a return: the better I sound, the more I enjoy playing.
The people at Flutistry examined my Sankyo flute and confirmed that it was in good condition, but that the oil in the mechanism had dried up, so when I got back home, I brought the flute in to the local flute expert, Elad Zeldes, a talkative old acquaintance of mine, and a meticulous technician. I just got it back from him today. I felt the difference in the fingering immediately. So now I've invested even more in the flute, cleaning, oiling, and adjusting. I also had to have my baritone saxophone fixed while I was gone, more money to a repairman.
I would rather not add up all the money I've spent on lessons, sheet music, instruments, and instrument repair - all with almost no possible return on the investment (okay, the instruments hold their value, so not all the money is irrecoverable). Though I have occasionally been paid to play, I don't think of myself as a professional musician, not even a semi-professional one. Music simply isn't on my accounting books as an activity involving profit and loss.
I have reached an age when people are liable to spiral down into a morass of regrets, and I am not totally immune to that disease, but one thing I have never actively regretted is not becoming a professional musician.