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.