Two Movies About Musical Geniuses

 Recently I saw the documentary about Jon Batiste, American Symphony, an astonishingly talented and intelligent young musician, as well as the biographical drama film about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro. Both of the movies are focused on the protagonists' dramatic and sometimes conflicted personal lives. In the case of Jon Batiste, while he is skyrocketing to success as a musician, his wife, Suleika Jaouad, is struggling with leukemia, and, as the movie progresses, we don't know any more than he did while the film was being made whether she would live or die. Leonard Bernstein is shown as a bisexual man whose extramarital homosexual affairs come close to destroying the happy married life he simultaneously strove to maintain.

Both artists are incredibly versatile and energetic, extremely gifted and hard working. Bernstein's legacy is monumental. Batiste is likely to garner similar achievements. Their musical talent is backed up by extensive study. Batiste has an advanced degree from Juilliard. Bernstein studied conducting and piano at the Curtis Institute after his BA in music at Harvard. Neither man sprang full form from the forehead of Zeus. However, the films hardly touched on their education at all.

What does emerge from the films is the factor of ego, personality, drive, and showmanship. Not every super talented musician has the flamboyant ambition of Bernstein and Batiste. Very few people can withstand the pressures of careers like theirs. Without the more modest talents and ambitions of the musicians who play with them and others in their retinues, they would be unable to achieve what they do. Partly they are egomaniacs who thrive on adulation. But they are also infinitely generous of their gifts.

Music and the War Effort

 

Photograph by David Young

For quite a few years I've been playing baritone saxophone in a quartet. Just playing together every week is satisfying and enjoyable, and it gives me a reason to keep practicing. At this time, during the war between Hamas and Israel, when many thousands of Israelis who live close to our borders have been evacuated and housed in hotels, we have performed twice to demonstrate our solidary with the evacuees and to raise their morale.

We're decent amateur musicians, and, if we weren't busy doing a million other things in our lives, and we managed to rehearse more than once a week, and sometimes not even that, we could get to a respectable level. As it is, our repertoire doesn't include challenging pieces that we might be capable of playing if we could rehearse more often and find time to master our parts on our own.

I often listen with admiration to performances of chamber music on my computer and in concert. It's magical to hear an ensemble playing together, in agreement about all the elements of the performance: pitch, tempo, dynamics, and articulation. Some string quartets, especially modern ones, are so demanding that it barely seems possible to play them. My own modest experience of playing in ensembles makes me appreciative.

I also listen to quite a bit of jazz, and when I hear performances of big bands like those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie I'm equally in awe of their tightness, which can only come from countless hours of playing together.

A Great Artist

 Quite a few years ago I read Artie Shaw's autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella, and was impressed by his intelligence and candor. Recently Youtube decided I'd be interested in an excellent Canadian documentary about Shaw, Time is All You've Got, showing many movies of his performances and in which he is interviewed. He is strikingly articulate and quite open, projecting a genial personality that conceals an extremely difficult character.

Several times in the interviews he says that it takes a good band (and he had very good bands) a month to master an arrangement (he was a perfectionist), making me realize how poorly the groups I've played with have prepared for performances.

He was clearly the musical equal of Benny Goodman, but somehow people don't remember him so well.

Huge Voices, Huge Talents, Huge Women

 Last night Youtube decided I'd be interested in a documentary about the gospel singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the algorithm was right. I'd only heard vaguely about her and was bowled over by the power of her singing and guitar playing. I guess Mahalia Jackson was better known and more influential. But, according to the documentary, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was enormously popular with Black audiences. She staged a wedding for herself in a baseball stadium, and it was full.

Aretha Franklin came from the gospel tradition, too, and the emotional power of her singing comes from it. A few years ago my wife and I saw a thrilling documentary about her return to gospel, making me wonder how American Blacks were able in a very short time to create a powerful religious tradition.

I claim no expertise, but it appears to me that the gospel style of singing is unique in its intensity and power. When Sister Rosetta Belted out a note, she did it with enormous confidence. She knew just what she wanted to sing. It's not operatic voice production, needed to fill an entire auditorium and be heard above an orchestra. It's also not the voice production needed by performers in musicals (Ethel Merman comes to mind, a woman with a huge voice) before microphones were installed. Her entire being was projected in her singing, with no fear or hesitation. Her guitar playing had the same quality.

Much of the documentary about Rosetta Tharpe presented the depth and cruelty of segregation in the south. The pictures of "white only" and "colored only" signs on restaurants and bathrooms, among other things, were shocking. One of the old women who was interviewed in the film had been a backup singer for Sister Rosetta and remembered how they had to sneak food to them out the back door of restaurants. How could such shameful treatment have seemed normal to southern whites?

Musicians like these women created great art in the face of this cruel adversity. It's inspiring.

More on "Practicing"

 Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, in a way, said he never practiced. He only played. What he meant was that practicing was a way of playing that didn't count. "I know it sounds bad, but I'm only practicing." Arnie insisted that playing must always count, even (and perhaps especially) mistakes.

My teacher had to cancel the flute lesson I was preparing for today, so I decided not to work on the pieces I'm learning for my lessons - an arrangement of the Bach Two Part inventions as a duet for two treble instruments and one of the Handel flute sonatas - and simply play whatever decided to come out of the flute, to find out what was on my musical mind, such as it is.

That was enlightening, another way of hearing myself playing, which, after all, is of prime importance. Hearing yourself is a step toward knowing yourself. Arnie used to tell his students about a musician who would say, "Don't ask my how I am until I've played my drums." That's how he knew how he was.

Practicing Regularly/Obsessively

I was in my sixties when I started taking flute lessons, after I realized I wasn't going to be able to master the instrument without instruction. When I was a high school student, playing the clarinet, I didn't practice every day by a long shot. I got to be pretty good anyway, and I was (stupidly) satisfied with my playing. But I realized I'd never come close to playing the flute decently unless I practiced a lot. I didn't have many pressing demands on my time, so it was easy to spend an hour or so every day to work toward getting a decent sound on the flute, and I enjoyed making progress, despite the frustration of not progressing fast enough.

Aspiring young musicians practice for hours upon hours, and professionals keep it up, but I'm neither young nor professional, and it's not clear to me what I'm actually aspiring to. Still, I practice almost every day. In part I'm afraid that if I don't practice, I'll lose whatever ability I've acquired and fall backward in my quest for a convincing, beautiful sound. Certainly I won't improve if I don't keep practicing, and improvement is important, because the better one is at it, the more one enjoys music. Pieces that were beyond one's ability are now merely challenging.

The main point of practicing, of course, it to keep learning: about your instrument, about the music you play, and about yourself.

Beyond my Ability

 In Bird, Clint Eastwood's movie about Charlie Parker, another inspiring saxophone player hears Parker play and, in despair, throws his horn off a bridge into a river. When I was a kid taking piano lessons, one of my teachers, a young man studying piano at Juilliard, threw in the towel and became a stockbroker, saying he could make better music with his record player than with his piano.

By the same token, I should give up flute. Recently the fine Israeli flutist, Idit Shemer, played a recital in our home, accompanied by Maggie Cole (who mainly plays harpsichord and fortepiano), and I was overwhelmed both by Idit's tone and by the way she and Maggie played demanding pieces with impeccable musicality and deep understanding of each other. Idit, according to the Internet, was born in 1961, and she's been playing the flute since her youth. Doing the arithmetic, that comes to about fifty years of experience. I was born in 1944 and only took up the flute about ten years ago. I'll never catch up!

Recently I saw an interview on Youtube with the pianist Garrick Ohlsson about playing Chopin. Ohlsson was charming and articulate, and, of course, intelligent and erudite. He evidently has memorized all of Chopin's oeuvre. When he wanted to demonstrate something he was saying, he effortlessly, without looking at music, plucked out the appropriate passage to make his point, from works by Chopin and other composers. That's a kind of musical mastery that comes from great training, deep practice, and a long career of performing all over the world.

I don't plan to give up on music, even though I'll never get to Idit's level on the flute or memorize tons of music like Ohlsson and other great musicians. I'm not a great musician and never aspired to be one. But I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from playing at my level.

In the past year I've been playing baritone saxophone in an ensemble that calls itself a big band, even though we're missing a few of the players we need to be a real big band. The conductor encourages us all to take solos, so I've been working on my harmonic skills, though, as above, I don't hear chord patterns as well as good jazz musicians do.

To train my ear and mind, I've been playing songs like "Till There Was You" (not the Beatles' version) in all twelve keys on flute and sax and also playing the basic rhythm changes pattern of I-VI-II-V, all twelve keys, trying to hear how each chord leads to the next one.

I hope that when our band plays in public, I'll be able to put out credible solos that demonstrate grasp of the harmonies and some inspiration, and that people will enjoy hearing them.

Originality, Banality, Forgery, and Authenticity

 I recently read an article about the German art forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi, who produced paintings in the style of well-known artists and sold them as originals, making a fortune until he slipped up. Now, according to the interview, he sells paintings under his own name for hefty prices. It got me wondering. Suppose Beltracchi, undoubtedly a talented and skillful painter, as well as an intelligent analyst of the styles of other painters, instead of forging the signatures of other artists, had produced paintings by Beltracchi in the style of X? Would anyone have bought them?

A counter-example is that of the Israeli composer, Elam Rotem, an expert musicologist and performer of baroque music. He has written several brilliant works in baroque style, with Hebrew texts, which, in my opinion, raise puzzling issues. Does their acknowledged excellence depend on their fidelity to eighteenth-century norms? Suppose another musicologist, expert in the baroque period, found an inconsistency in Rotem's twenty-first century compositions, something that no baroque composer would have done? Would that disqualify Rotem's work?

On the other hand, suppose a genuine eighteenth-century manuscript by a known composer of the era, suddenly turned up, containing departures from the idiom of his time, harmonies, let's say, or rhythmic figures, that don't fit into our understanding of baroque music? Such a discovery would force musicologists to modify their understanding of the baroque style.

Rotem's works stand on their musical quality, their interest, their ability to move the listener. They are not banal exercises in the baroque style. Recently, for about a month I was working on the the first violin part, arranged for flute, of Bach's double concerto in D Minor, a splendid work, too difficult for me. The challenge of learning Bach's music, even though I couldn't play it adequately, was valuable. As I worked on it, I kept wondering how Bach did it. Why are the sequences of notes that he wrote so deep and moving?

To take a rest from Bach and play something closer to within my reach, I've started working on some pleasant Kuhlau duets for two flutes, and the more I play it, the less I find in them. I wouldn't have the temerity to call the music banal, but does anyone mention Kuhlau and Bach in the same breath?

Getting back to Beltracchi, the paintings he did in the style of artists who were well-known, but not among the pioneering geniuses of twentieth-century art (at least so I gathered from the article), would probably have been considered banal if he had signed them in his own name. When they were taken to be authentic works, their value depended on the solid achievements of the painters they were attributed to.

Bach and Kern

I've been studying the first violin part of Bach's double concerto in d minor on the flute in preparation for playing it as a duet with my teacher. It's a very demanding piece. My teacher kind of apologized for assigning it to me. But it's inexhaustible. It doesn't matter how much you practice it, because you'll always notice something new in it. I'm happy to play it over and over again.

I also decided to go back to "All the Things Your Are" and memorize the chords again. I have no problem playing the melody. I've played it dozens of times, but I don't hear how the chords fit in under it. I've started playing the chords on the piano and putting the melody in over them, and it's making more sense to me. Obviously the only way I'll ever start hearing the changes is by doing this kind of work with them.

What's the connection between those musical endeavors? When I play the Bach I try to be aware of what's going on harmonically as I play, as he modulates between keys and adds and takes away accidentals. (Oddly, the first version of the concerto that I was playing was arranged for soprano recorder, and for some reason the arranger didn't include the key signature of one flat in his version of the first and third movements. That troubled me.)

Seeing and hearing what Bach was doing when he wrote the concerto should help me understand what Jerome Kern was doing when he wrote the music for "All the Things Your Are," and vice versa. One web site I saw credited Kern with Bach-like harmonic sophistication. I'll buy that.

As I was writing here I began to wonder whether Kern wrote the music before Hammerstein wrote the words but I couldn't find an answer.

Thoughts About the Challenge of Improvising

 For quite a few years I stopped trying to improvise, because I realized that the music written by composers such as Bach, Telemann, and Mozart was much better than anything I might come up with. Recently, however, I joined a gradually growing big band that rehearses not far from my house, and I've been improvising again on the baritone saxophone. The director of the band encourages us to give it a try and it's an enjoyable challenge. But it doesn't come easily to me.

There are many types of improvisation. In the baroque period musicians were expected to be able to add ornamentation to pieces, and keyboard players were expected to improvise accompaniments to a melody from a figured bass line. Jazz keyboard players are supposed to be able to do improvise on a jazz standard based on a lead sheet, giving the melody, with chord symbols written above the staff. It's also possible to improvise without specific reference to a given melody.

Improvisation on a jazz standard for a melody instrument (a "horn") or for the right hand on a keyboard, requires a lot of skills that never came naturally to me. First, the improvisor has to bear in mind the form of the tune, usually a 32 measure piece consisting of an eight measure presentation of the tune (the A part), which is repeated, followed by an eight measure bridge (the B part), and completed by a restatement of the initial melody. In short: AABA. Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm" is the archetypical tune with that form. Sometimes, though, the form can be ABAB or ABAC. And sometimes songwriters depart from the typical 32 bar form.

Second, of course, the improvisor has to know the melody.

Third, the improvisor has to know which chords that the composer placed beneath his or her melody (the "changes").

Fourth, the improvisor has to know how the melody can be reharmonized by substituting chords for the ones the composer provided, which one musician I once knew called "movie chords," because they're often less sophisticated than the ones that jazz musicians came up with as they played the tune over the years.

Finally, with all the foregoing in mind, the improvisor has to play an interesting, exciting melody while the rhythm section of the band - the drums, bass, guitar, and piano - play the form of the tune. A good improvisation is in dialogue with the other musicians in the ensemble, and it's also in dialogue with the song the ensemble started off with. 

Different Kinds of Musicians

 My wife and I just spent a week in Malta to attend a baroque music festival. The music was sublime. The musicians were international professionals. The venues where the concerts were held were all picturesque. The appeal of baroque music has stood the test of time. It's less sentimental and bombastic than romantic music, clearer and more abstract. I admire the skill of the performers as well as the erudition of musicologists who edit the scores and study the performance styles of the time, as well as the waves of influence between Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and England.

One performance we saw was of English song from Purcell on, performed by Kate Semmens, a soprano, and the English harpsichordist Steven Devine. Halfway through the concert Devine "confessed" (as he put it) that the accompaniment he had been playing wasn't written out, and he was improvising over a figured bass. That's a skill I admire, one that classical pianists d on't necessarily acquire.

Last night we heard an unusual jazz trio: the singer Julia Feldman, the guitarist Steve Peskoff, and the keyboardist Richard Samuels. They improvised, of course, over the chords of the songs, and the result was fascinating. I admire the skill of jazz musicians, which I mostly lack, more than I admire the skill of musicians who sit in an orchestra and read notes, which I can more or less do.