Composer, Song-Writer, Arranger, Orchestrator

 I've started reading Jan Swafford's biography of Beethoven, written by a composer, with the insights of a composer. I'm only up to the point when Beethoven has gone to Vienna and started studying with Haydn. One of Swafford's points so far has been that Beethoven learned the techniques of composition - how to develop a musical idea, for example.

I am not much interested in pop,, but I do listen to a lot of jazz, much of which is based on show tunes and the melodic popular and theatrical music of the 1920s-1950s: what is sometimes called the Great American Songbook, mainly songs by Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers, Carmichael, Arlen, and Porter. Of those, Gershwin also made himself into a composer, and Rodgers also composed impressive instrumental works. However, very few classical composers proper wrote songs as good as those (an exception is Vladimir Dukelsky, aka Vernon Duke), and not many song-writers, as far as I know, were also serious classical composers.

Diversity of talent is one of its most fascinating aspects.

Recently I read a Hebrew article in Haaretz about recent scientific challenges to the belief in individual identity. The boundaries between us and our fellow beings, human and others, are much more permeable and blurred than we like to think. It's seductive to think of and admire great geniuses in whatever field we're interested in, like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest. But without the ordinary good musicians who played their works and the non-professional musical lovers who appreciated them, there would have been no context for their genius. And if talents were not diverse, creative people would not stimulate one another.

Finding a Musical Direction

 I practice flute every day, with rare exceptions. I begin with a long series of warmup exercises that I learned from Ory Schneor, an excellent Israeli flautist who is now based in Vienna. I took the three-hour warmup course he gives and have been diligently using the exercises he taught me. He suggested that I should think about them as a form of meditation, and that works for me.

After doing the tone-production exercises he prescribed, I have been using the sixteenth note passages in the Bach flute sonatas as exercises in articulation. First I play through a page or so with breath articulation, blowing on each separate note, hu-hu-hu, etc. I can only do that rather slowly, of course. So playing it that way helps me master the notes. Then I play the same page with single tonguing, tu-tu-tu, etc. I can play it a bit faster that way. Finally, I play the page with double-tonguing, tu-ku-tu-ku, etc. I can play the passages even fast that way, and, since I've already gone through them twice, I am close to getting them up to true allegro.

Playing Bach rather than an exercise by Taffanel, for example, might be less valuable for developing technique, but it's of more value musically. For a while I was playing mainly baroque music like the Haendel flute sonatas and some sonatas by Locatelli, and pieces by Telemann, but I'm leaning toward more recent music now. I've been playing a flute arrangement of Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante defunte," the three Schumann romances (originally written for Oboe), and just now I've started playing a Minuet by Bizet from the Arlesienne suite. With a pianist friend I've been playing arrangements of tangos by Piazzola (just about the only playing with someone that I've been able to do recently), and now and then I take out my fakebook and play a bunch of standards. Mainly I prefer to play standards on sax, but bossa nova sounds great on flute.

The one direction I know I don't want to go is toward flashy, virtuosic playing, mainly because I'll never get there, having started flute at such an advanced age, and lacking the necessary talent in any event. Recently, while driving to have my Covid inoculation, I heard a broadcast of Galway playing the "Concierto Pastoral" by Rodrigo, and I was bowled over by both the music and by Galway's brilliance as a performer. When I looked it up on Youtube I found a performance of the piece by a twelve-year-old prodigy, Julin Cheung. Since I'll never be able to play that well technically, I'll have to aim at playing as musically as I can, and at getting to as deep an understanding and appreciation of music as I can.